Marinas, superyachts and a busy cruise bay

The marinas, most of them in one bay

Montenegro has 6 full-service marinas with about 2,026 berths between them. Most sit in or near the mouth of the Bay of Kotor; the others are in Budva and on the Luštica peninsula.

• Porto Montenegro, Tivat: 515 berths, for yachts up to 250 m.
• Portonovi Marina, Herceg Novi: 238 berths, for yachts up to 140 m.
• Lazure Marina, Herceg Novi: 156 berths.
• Port of Budva: 630 berths, the largest by count.
• Kalimanj Port, Tivat: 372 berths.
• LušticaBay Marina: 115 berths.

Škver Port in Herceg Novi adds 32 more, but those are used by the port's managing agency, a shipping company and a local water polo club rather than offered commercially.

The list mixes town harbours, such as Budva and Kalimanj, with resort marinas. Porto Montenegro, Portonovi and LušticaBay are private developments in which the marina sits inside a resort with hotels, branded residences and shops. All three of the latter appear in our track record, and together they show the model behind the flagship projects featured there.

Room for superyachts

Porto Montenegro can berth a yacht of up to 250 m. Portonovi takes yachts of up to 140 m. Superyachts matter out of proportion to their numbers. They bring owners and guests who book the top suites and restaurants, and crews who live aboard or nearby for months, buy provisions and use repair and refit services.

For a hotel investor, a superyacht marina is an anchor tenant. It brings high-spending visitors who arrive by sea rather than by charter flight, and it keeps a resort town busy in spring and autumn when yachts move between the Mediterranean and their winter berths. It helps explain why the marina-led resorts have drawn several international hotel brands.

Cruise traffic through Kotor

The Port of Kotor, inside the UNESCO-listed bay, has two cruise berths and three anchorages. Cruise calls collapsed during the pandemic, to 64 in 2021, and have since recovered to 483 in 2025. Yacht calls reached 1,075. Cruise and yacht passengers together totalled 584,079 in 2025, close to the year before: traffic has levelled off at its post-pandemic high.

Two notes on the data. The guide's text gives a total for port calls in 2025 that does not match the chart, so we use the chart's figures only. The chart also shows the same number of cruise calls in 2022 and 2023, which may be a copying error and is flagged for confirmation with the Ministry of Maritime Affairs.

Cruise passengers, who make up most of the passenger total, are day visitors. They spend on excursions, food and shopping, but they do not fill hotel rooms, and at peak they crowd Kotor's old town. Treat cruise volume as a sign of the bay's global profile, not as hotel demand.

Bar: a second cruise port

The Port of Adria in Bar has a passenger terminal that can take cruise ships of over 300 m. It handled 72,837 passengers in 2025, up nearly fivefold since 2022, and expects almost 200,000 cruise passengers in 2026. The guide does not reconcile those two figures, so treat the 2026 number as an expectation. A second cruise port outside the bay can spread cruise visitors along the southern coast and toward Skadar Lake and the capital.

Ferries to Dubrovnik

Seasonal sea links to Croatia run from June to September 2026: Budva–Dubrovnik sails six a week in July and August, and Kotor–Dubrovnik three a week. Regional work is under way to connect air and sea transport across the southern Adriatic.

These routes make Dubrovnik's airport and its large visitor flows part of Montenegro's catchment, and they make two-country itineraries easy to sell. For a hotel in Herceg Novi, Kotor or Budva, that widens the pool of guests who can reach it in a day. For the moment the links are summer-only, so they add to the peak rather than helping the shoulder months.

What it means for a hotel project

The nautical market rewards projects that are built around the water. A hotel with its own berths, or a partnership with a nearby marina, can sell to yacht owners and charter guests in May, June, September and October, months when beach demand is thin. Refit yards, provisioning and crew services create year-round local jobs and a base of off-season residents. Cruise traffic, by contrast, adds visibility but little hotel revenue, and in Kotor it brings congestion that a nearby hotel has to manage. Investors weighing a coastal site should look first at its distance from a marina and its access to Tivat airport, and only then at cruise numbers.