Marella Cruises makes reusable coffee cups permanent across fleet

Marella Cruises has turned a shipboard coffee trial into a permanent policy, extending reusable cups across its five-ship fleet after the test on Marella Explorer cut 180,000 single-use plastic items. For coffee service at sea, that is more than a sustainability gesture. It is a hard-scale check on whether reusable cups can hold up when the café is always busy, the wash cycle never really stops, and convenience has to survive inside a closed hospitality system.

The trial began in April 2025 on Marella Explorer with 2,500 reusable coffee cups and lids stocked at The Coffee Port, the ship’s premium all-inclusive coffee shop. During the three-month run, Marella said 3,500 takeaway coffees were served every week onboard, giving the line a steady stream of real-world use cases rather than a one-off showcase. World Coffee Portal reported that the effort saved 180,000 single-use plastic items, a result that appears to have been strong enough to push the company from pilot mode into permanent operation.

The rollout now reaches the entire Marella Cruises fleet, which is expected to eliminate more than 1.4 million single-use plastic cups, lids and sleeves in 2026 alone. Reusable cups will be placed in each cabin on arrival, letting guests use them both onboard and ashore. That detail matters for service flow as much as for waste reduction, because it takes the cup out of a single counter transaction and turns it into part of the guest experience from the moment they board.

Marella and partner Apollo Group are treating the change as a large-scale waste reduction measure, but it is also a practical test of whether cruise-volume coffee can stay fast, familiar and hot without defaulting to disposables. Olivia Wells, Marella’s sustainability manager, tied the trial to TUI’s commitment to the Global Tourism Plastics Initiative, the UN-led effort launched by the United Nations Environment Programme and World Tourism Organization in collaboration with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. TUI Group is a signatory and Advisory Committee member, which gives this rollout a wider travel-industry frame.

For coffee service, the significance is simple: Marella proved the reusable model could work in a high-traffic, all-inclusive setting, then pushed it from one ship to five. That is the real stress test, and it is now running fleetwide.