You can always count on the Norwegians to keep things cool—but not when Hurtigruten CEO Hedda Felin takes the microphone.
At this year’s Nor-Shipping 2025 in Oslo—a grand gathering of maritime movers and shakers, sea-dogs, and policy pirates—Felin sailed straight into the bureaucratic fog with a clarion call that cut through the claptrap like a bow slicing open the Barents Sea.
“We don’t have time for vague promises,” she declared, torching the room’s temperature a full two degrees with a single sentence.
It wasn’t just a keynote—it was a cold-water bucket to the face of complacency. And judging by the hushed silence in the room, a few suits hadn’t packed a towel.
Hurtigruten, that storied Norwegian cruise line whose name quite literally means the fast route, is living up to its name in every sense. But this time, they’re speeding toward a carbon-neutral future—and they’re doing it without the fluff, fluffery, or the floating fibs that cruise industry marketing departments are all too fond of.
Felin’s keynote—delivered at Innovation Norway’s Pre-Match Making forum—wasn’t just a performance. It was a challenge. Not just to governments, not just to financiers, but to every executive with one foot on the gangplank and the other in a quarterly report.
“We operate in one of the world’s most polluting industries,” Felin admitted with refreshing candour, “so we’ve made a conscious choice—to be part of the solution.”
CEO Hedda Felin speaking at Nor-Shipping 2025
📢 And she wasn’t talking about painting hulls green and hoping for the best.
From pioneering the world’s first emission-free ship project to rolling out hybrid engine conversions that actually work (and not just on PowerPoint), Hurtigruten is coughing up capital where others offer only quotes.
And they’re not just fiddling about with a few exhaust filters. This is full-throttle reinvention. Environmental upgrades that cost real coin. Carbon-cutting conversions so hefty they’d give a bean-counter heart palpitations. And a willingness to admit what so few in the sector will: that the old way is sinking fast.
And let’s not forget Gerry Larsson-Fedde, Hurtigruten’s COO, who wasn’t far behind Felin—quite literally. While she was commanding the main stage, he was knee-deep in talks on biodiversity and the maritime workforce, locking horns and linking arms with the likes of HUB Ocean and DNV. If you’ve never seen a conversation between a data scientist and a ship’s chief engineer, it’s not for the faint-hearted—or the chronically impatient.
Meanwhile, Down Under…
The Australians weren’t just watching from the shore. Environment Minister Murray Watt, having barely shaken the sand from his shoes after the UN Ocean Conference in France, brought some refreshing Aussie backbone to the Nordic stage.
He confirmed Australia’s commitment to ratifying the High Seas Biodiversity Treaty—a legal mouthful, yes, but one that could very well shape the next century of ocean protection.
But the biggest splash may have come from none other than our own Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, who showed up at Nor-Shipping with a salt-crusted plan of his own. The mining magnate-turned-marine crusader pitched his idea for partnering with developing nations to fund marine protection zones.
“There’s no such thing as a sustainable future,” Twiggy said bluntly, “if we’re still turning a blind eye to illegal fishing in someone else’s backyard.”
Say what you like about Forrest, but he doesn’t pack a lukewarm message. And this one landed with the force of a rogue wave.
Less Talk, More Rudder
The unspoken theme of Nor-Shipping this year? Less talking, more turning of the rudder. Less lobbying and more laying of the keel. And if anyone embodied that spirit, it was Felin, who wasn’t interested in sugar-coating the industry’s failings.
She threw down the gauntlet on infrastructure, financing, emissions, and—most critically—the outdated idea that sustainability is a ‘nice to have’ rather than a business imperative.
“We must change how we build, finance, and operate ships,” she said. “Not someday—now.”
And unlike the many panellists who seem to believe platitudes power their microphone, Felin walked the talk. Or more accurately, she sailed it.
A Rising Tide
This year’s Nor-Shipping wasn’t a mere gathering of well-fed maritime elites. It was a convergence of urgency.
Australia and Norway are emerging as parallel powerhouses in ocean protection—two nations thousands of kilometres apart, yet united by a shared maritime DNA and a growing intolerance for inaction.
And Hurtigruten? It’s no longer just a cruise line. It’s becoming a blueprint. A proof that you can run a profitable, beloved, and operationally complex tourism business while holding yourself to higher standards than the industry ever thought possible.
They’ve bet the rudder on it. And if the crowd in Oslo is anything to go by, others are ready to follow suit.
So let this be a wake-up call to every operator still pouring diesel into rhetoric: The waters are rising. The tide is turning. And Hurtigruten, with Felin at the helm, is already underway.
By Bridget Gomez
