Cruise Ship Tourism

Cruise Ship Tourism

Cruise ship tourism is a concept within the field of niche tourism, and

Novelli and Robinson (2005, p. 9) describes Niche Tourism as “Special interests, culture and/or activity based tourism involving small numbers of tourists in authentic settings”.

The Scottish Parliament Information Centre (2002, p. 1) states that: “In any market, ‘niche’ is a specific segment, usually with a well-defined product that can be tailored to meet the interests of the customer.”

There are a number of different niche tourism products available today, and niche tourism has emerged as a counter market to mass tourism. Some examples of niche tourism products are; adventure tourism, golf tourism, dark tourism, volunteer tourism and wine and culinary tourism. Cruise ship tourism is a very interesting part of the Niche tourism market as the growth of cruise tourism is phenomenal. Cruise tourism forms a small but increasing part of the global tourism industry (Dowling 2006).

According to the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary (2010) a Cruise is defined as “a journey by sea, visiting different places, especially as a holiday/vacation”. The cruise ship industry has a long history as the sea has been used as a way of carrying passengers from one port to another for centuries.

But how did cruise ship tourism become the industry it is today? What are the biggest challenges of today’s industry, and how can new target groups be marketed? These are just a few of the issues discussed in this essay.

The modern cruise ship industry we know today has developed through centuries, and Dickinson and Vladimir (2008) has outlined the evolution from steamship transportation to cruising as a vacation in their book titled “Selling the Sea: an Inside Look at the Cruise ship Industry”. As early as 1840, Samuel Cunard inaugurated regular mail and passenger service by forming the British and North American Royal Mail Steam Packet Company by request of the British Post Office that needed a safe, reliable and regularly scheduled liner to carry their mail across the Atlantic ocean. The original tasks of these ships were indeed to deliver mail, but for revenue purposes passengers were included. These trips in the first half of the 1800s were not really cruises, but a destination voyage to get from A to B. At this time, it was the best and only mean of transportation across the Atlantic, so attention to comfort for the passengers was perhaps not as significant as today. Historians disagree as to what can be described as the “First Cruise”. Dickinson and Vladimir however, support the claim of the Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O), that they invented cruising. They ran ships from Britain to Spain and Portugal, and to Malay and China in the early 1800s. In the 1880s the British Medical Journal