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Abstract
Cruise industry presents an active and rapid development in recent years. Due to the rich tourism resource and potential tourism market, China has become the core component of the Asian market. Identifying factors that affect cruise homeport selection systematically and designing scientific evaluation system are the keys to selecting the optimal cruise homeport location. We analysed the influence factors motivating the cruise liner companies to select a specific port as the cruise homeport and designed an index system includes both quantitative indices and qualitative indices following the basic principles of index selection. In order to resolve the problem of incomplete information and randomness of the decision-making process, the grey-cloud clustering model was used for evaluation of cruise homeport selection. Further, we conducted a case study to evaluate whether or not these nine cruise ports, such as Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenzhen and Sanya, are eligible to be homeports in China. Finally, several suggestions to improve the chance of being selected as a cruise homeport were recommended from viewpoints of port facilities, services and policy conditions. The results show that the model can reasonably and effectively help decision-makers to facilitate the homeport selection in real operations.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the anonymous referees for their careful reading and valuable comments on our manuscript, which significantly improved this manuscript. Additionally, we would like to thank Jenny Tunstall, Chris Cooper and C. Michael Hall, the editors of Current Issues in Tourism, for their incessant support and forbearance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.