Carnival cruise company plans to move its Miami-Dade headquarters
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Carnival Corp. is heading to a new port in South Florida.
The cruise ship company announced this week it plans to move its corporate headquarters from Doral to a growing business district near Miami International Airport.
“We don’t want to see them go,” Doral Mayor Christi Fraga said. “Our city is nostalgic for them.”
Fraga said she’s disappointed with the decision, but also confident that another company will express interest in the Carnival campus at Northwest 87th Avenue and 36th Street.
“Everyone recognizes them around here,” said Fraga, who noted that Carnival, founded by the Arison family, was one of the earliest and largest companies to move to Doral in the 1980s. Micky Arison, son of Carnival founder Ted Arison, owns the Miami Heat basketball team.
New headquarters for Carnival
The cruise giant announced on May 5 that it had purchased property in the Waterford Business District, just south of the airport, as the future site of the company’s new “state-of-the-art global headquarters development.” On what’s now vacant land, Carnival will build a multi-building campus that will initially accommodate over 2,000 workers. The company will move most of its onshore employees there from other business units, including Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, Seabourn, Cunard and Costa Cruises.
The campus is expected to be completed in 2028 and become Carnival’s new global headquarters and its main North America office. Carnival will join other multinational companies based in the area, including Subway and Burger King.
It will “for the first time unite in a single location most of its North America shoreside team members from across the corporation and its cruise line operating units,” the company said in a statement. Employees based at the Doral headquarters will continue to work there until the move.
Carnival paid $26.9 million for a 15-acre parcel on the northeast corner of Northwest Seventh Street and 65th Avenue, according to Blanca Commercial Real Estate, leasing agent for the Waterford Business District and advisor on the deal.
The cruise company is “planning to build a larger campus than what they have in Doral,” Tere Blanca, CEO of Blanca Commercial Real Estate, told the Miami Herald.
That follows more remote workers returning to the office after the COVID pandemic — “the trend is to be more in the office than not,” Blanca said.
A change of plans for Carnival
Carnival’s move seems to be a reversal from its plans when the company put its Doral office up for sale over a year ago. At the time, Carnival was looking for a smaller space.
“We understand this was a downsizing,” Mayor Fraga said, “because the building was pretty empty after COVID.”
Bloomberg reported last year that Carnival was looking to sell the Doral headquarters, which is 470,000 square feet, and move to a 300,000-square-feet building.
While the Doral office is on 18 acres and the land at the Waterford Business District is on 15 acres, the proposed new global headquarters when finished will initially take up 600,000 to 700,000 square feet, Carnival’s statement said.
Fraga and Blanca are confident Carnival will eventually find a buyer for the Doral building.
“It’s a phenomenal site for development,” Blanca said. “Doral has a very established business district.”
Carnival’s plans are a boost for the growing Waterford Business District, already home to Subway, Verizon and Assurant. Nuveen Real Estate and PIMCO Real Estate own the district and worked on the deal with Carnival.
Waterford “is experiencing tremendous momentum in terms of activity,” said Blanca, who expects more deals this year.
Carnival’s new campus will be designed from scratch. When finished, it will include open collaboration zones, individual workplaces and “ample meeting rooms.”
One thing that won’t change: A global headquarters building isn’t the same as where a company is registered. Carnival is incorporated in Panama.
“We are primarily foreign corporations engaged in the business of operating cruise ships in international transportation,” the company wrote in its 2024 annual report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Because of that and a part of the Internal Revenue Service Code, “substantially all of Carnival’s Corporation’s income is exempt from U.S. federal income and branch profit taxes,” the company wrote.
Carnival does pay property tax, however. In 2024, the company paid a $1.1 million tax bill on the Doral headquarters, according to Miami-Dade County property records.
This story was originally published May 7, 2025 at 11:21 AM.
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