European Cruise ports: challenges since the pre-pandemic era

ABSTRACT

This study provides an empirical analysis of the challenges that cruise ports in Europe were facing before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 triggered an unprecedented global health and economic crisis with severe, and potentially structural, consequences for the cruise world. In this context, knowledge of the key challenges that cruise ports need to address builds capacities for conceptualising, but also better responding, in the post-COVID-19 conditions to both pre-existing challenges and the ones produced by the pandemic. The study examines the former group of challenges. It does so analysing a survey answered by 155 cruise ports in 34 countries in the two European markets (North Europe and the Med) just before the pandemic outbreak. The survey identifies the significance of different types of challenges (operational, strategic, societal, environmental), and the hierarchy of challenges referring to the relationships between ports and cruise lines. Detailing which issues were (not) shared by the entire cruise port industry, the findings reveal that the pre-pandemic search for sustainable growth of the cruise activities hosted had led to diverging challenges in each of these two cruise markets. They also establish that port governance models do matter when it comes to the variation of the confronted challenges. These results imply that policy initiatives based on a “one size fits all” approach would provide a rather ineffective helping hand in resolving the major of the identified challenges.

KEYWORDS:

• Cruise ports
• port governance
• port policy
• European cruise policy
• cruise sipping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To give an example, a 4.000 lower berth ship on annualised 50 weeks deployment in a standard seven-day itinerary of six ports (one homeport, five transit ports) Mediterranean itinerary, and excluding any effect of inter-porting, generates almost 1.4 million passenger movements, plus 300.000 crew visits, per annum. The annual number of cruises on board the approximately 300 operating cruise vessels translates to over 160 million cruise passenger movements in ports around the globe.

2 A preliminary version of the study, entitled European Cruise ports: Variation of challenges and policy implications, containing the key findings of the survey, was presented by the authors at the International Association of Maritime Economists (IAME) Conference 2019, Athens, Greece (Pallis & Papachristou, 2019); available on www.PortEonomics.eu). The conclusions of the research have also contributed to shaping the themes of the Cartagena dialogue: Preparing Ports, Cities & Destinations for the next day of cruising that was held in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, February 2020 (see the related call for papers available on www.PortEconomics.eu). The authors would like to thank those colleagues participating in these events that provided suggestions for advancing the study. We would also like to thank the editors of Transport Reviews and three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that have motivated further improvements of our research.

3 The 28 million passenger movements in the Mediterranean market were 3,5 times the respective number of 2000 (MedCruise, 2020). Within five years the number of passengers in the Asian market had tripled to 4,5 million (CLIA, 2019b).

4 At the end of 2019 each of the 50 biggest cruise ships had a capacity surpassing 3,000 passengers and the order-book exceeded 120 vessels (Cruise Industry News, 2019).

5 Carnival’s 10 different brands control 47% of the global market; Royal Caribbean Cruise Line (RCCL) and its three brands control approximately one quarter; Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings brands represent a 9.5% market share and MSC owned vessels 7%.

6 The use of Kruskal-Wallis is a commendable analysis of variance when: (a) the dependent variable is measured at the ordinal or continuous level (i.e. the case of the Likert scale used in our survey); and (b) the independent variable consists of two or more independent groups, whereas in our case there are three groups offering a number of independent observations.