This is Hurtigruten part four: an original coastal voyage, told across five ATTA News Stories, exploring Hurtigruten's leadership, evolution, and collaboration with ATTA in the adventure travel trade. Published in collaboration with the Adventure Travel Trade Association.
Carly Biggart left Hurtigruten after this interview series was conducted. In this fourth story, Hurtigruten examines what partnership actually means in practice, from the small farms and fishing villages along Norway's coast to the global networks that hold the company accountable to the values it has built its reputation on.
When a travel company describes a community as a partner, the question worth asking is: who designed the terms? Who holds the risk? And who would still be standing if the relationship ended tomorrow? The answers tend to reveal whether partnership is a value or a vocabulary choice. For Hurtigruten, the distinction matters. The company's model is built on the premise that local partnerships are not a feature of the product. They are the product.
"Our local partnerships are what make Hurtigruten and also the guest experience," says Carly Biggart, former Head of Hurtigruten Americas. "Our global partnerships shape how we think, learn, and set standards for ourselves. Organizations like the ATTA provide space for dialogue, benchmarking, and shared learning across regions and business models. While our operations are rooted in Norway, these broader partnerships ensure we remain connected to global best practice and evolving traveler expectations."
That two-level structure, local and global, reflects how Hurtigruten has come to think about collaboration: one set of relationships shapes what the experience delivers, and another shapes how the company continues to evolve. Both are necessary. Neither is sufficient on its own.
Built From the Ground Up
Along Norway's coast, the texture of Hurtigruten's local partnerships is visible in specifics: Norway's Coastal Kitchen sources from more than 70 farms, fisheries, bakeries, and producers along the route, including named partners like Lyngen Reker for shrimp and prawns, Myremar and Sigerfjord Fish for cod and Arctic char, Myklevik Farm in Lofoten for vegetables and herbs, and Lofoten Seaweed, founded by two friends whose product now appears on menus alongside the story of how it was made. These are not anonymous supply chain relationships. Producers are featured by name onboard, turning what could be just a procurement decision into part of the guest narrative. For advisors, that specificity is a selling tool. Named farms, named villages, named people: these are the details that justify premium positioning, that answer the client who asks what makes this different from any other Norway cruise, and that transform a booking conversation from price comparison into value alignment.
In Kjollefjord, a small fishing village of around 1,000 people, a Sami cultural and snowmobile business grew from nothing into a year-round employer through its partnership with Hurtigruten. The predictability of regular ship calls created the conditions for a local entrepreneur to build something sustainable, with Hurtigruten described by the business as the backbone of its operations. That kind of relationship, multi-year, commercially meaningful, and tied to a specific community's economic trajectory, is what Hurtigruten points to when it describes its model as distinct from conventional cruise tourism.
"Public affairs is a key focus of our business, and we meet regularly with the local communities in which we operate, ranging from port management to excursion providers to local fishermen or farmers that provide us with locally-sourced produce," Biggart explains. "Or like the Open Village concept, where new experiences were created in partnership with the small communities that never really received tourists before but wanted to find a way to welcome them."
That last point is worth pausing on. Open Village did not begin as a program Hurtigruten designed and offered to communities. It began with communities that had never been part of the tourism economy at all, and a company willing to structure an entirely new model around their terms: Guests pay nothing for the experiences. The company pays each community directly per visit. The experiences themselves are shaped by what residents want to share, not what a travel product manager decided would sell. That community-first inversion, product-second, is not standard practice in cruise tourism, expedition, or otherwise. Most operators build excursion programs and invite communities to participate. Hurtigruten built the participation model and let the program follow. For trade partners positioning Hurtigruten against competitors, that distinction is not a nuance. It is the argument.
When a Farm Changes the Way You Operate
"The relationship we have with one of our farms led us to realize that we could create a full circular economy initiative while addressing food waste," Biggart says. "We worked with the port of Stamsund to install a reactor that turns all of our Original Voyage ships' edible food waste to compost in 24 hours. It is then transported to Myklevik Farm, where it's used as fertilizer for the vegetables we buy. So we take waste and turn it back into food."
The significance of that story for trade partners is not the circular system itself (which was covered in earlier installments of this series), but what it reveals about the quality of the relationship that made it possible. A transactional supplier arrangement does not produce that kind of operational innovation. A long-term partnership built on trust, honest conversation, and a willingness to experiment does. The farm was not handed a contract. It was brought into a problem and helped solve it. For advisors whose clients are arriving with questions about food sourcing, waste reduction, and supply chain ethics (and increasingly, they are) tthat story is not a sustainability footnote. It is a booking-level conversation. The traveler who asks what happens to the food scraps from last night's dinner has a verifiable, named, geographically specific answer. That kind of traceability is what separates a credible sustainability program from a marketing position, and it gives partners something concrete to stand behind when the conversation moves beyond destination and price.
What Global Membership Makes Possible
At the other end of the partnership spectrum sits Hurtigruten's relationship with ATTA, which operates differently but serves a complementary function. Where local partnerships ground the company in the realities of specific communities, membership in a global network like ATTA connects it to the broader industry conversation about where responsible tourism is heading and what standards are emerging.
"Our relationship with the ATTA has been an important source of perspective and accountability," Biggart says. "Being part of a global network of values-led operators helps us test our thinking, stay informed, and remain outward-looking. It reinforces that responsible tourism is not something you do alone. That shared framework has helped guide our direction while ensuring we continue to evolve with intention."
For an operator like Hurtigruten, whose work is geographically concentrated on a single coastline, that global reach offers something its local partnerships cannot: exposure to how the same challenges are being approached in completely different contexts, and access to the conversations that shape industry norms before they become requirements.
A Framework for Partnership That Travels
"A good partnership is values aligned, long-term, and built on trust rather than transaction," Biggart says. "It encourages honest conversation, knowledge sharing, and mutual accountability. We value partnerships that challenge us to do better and support progress over time, rather than those focused solely on short-term commercial outcomes."
That framework applies consistently across the range of relationships Hurtigruten maintains, whether the partner is a seaweed farmer in Lofoten, an excursion operator in a remote village, or a global trade association with members whose work spans all seven continents. The common thread is longevity and shared direction, not contract value.
For operators elsewhere in the adventure travel sector looking to build partnerships responsibly, Biggart is direct: "Choose partners based on shared values, not just visibility or scale. Be clear about what you stand for, commit for the long term, and approach partnerships as opportunities to learn rather than validate existing assumptions. Responsible partnerships should create progress, not just alignment on paper."
And on what Hurtigruten offers communities beyond the economic contribution that has been documented and measured: "Beyond economic impact, Hurtigruten offers continuity, advocacy, and visibility on a global stage. Through responsible travel frameworks and transparent reporting, we help ensure communities are not only visited, but respected and sustained over time."
For ATTA members, that combination of local embeddedness and global accountability reflects the model the association has long advocated for: adventure tourism that strengthens community relationships from the ground up, while remaining connected to the standards and networks that hold it to account from the outside in. Hurtigruten's partnerships, at every level, are the infrastructure through which those values move from principle to practice.
The fifth and final article in this series looks ahead, examining Hurtigruten's long-term vision for the Norwegian coast and what its commitments to innovation, sustainability, and trade development mean for the future of adventure travel. Watch for it in October 2026.