When it comes to cruise liners, one person’s romantic floating pleasure palace is another’s suppurating human lasagne. The cruise ship industry has never been more popular, yet at the same time, more reviled.
France’s Nice has become the latest port to consider banning most tourist ships, as the industry’s pollution and overcrowding continue to massively outweigh the economic benefits for the places they visit.
Nice’s mayor, Christian Estrosi, has scorned the ships’ low-value tourist spend and the nuisance of thousands of extra people traipsing around and, he says, “leaving their rubbish” in his picturesque boulevards.
Italy, Spain, Croatia and others are constantly adding further restrictions to ship size and disembarkation numbers, and from the start of this year, new European Union restrictions on ships’ dirty fuel have been imposed.
Scotland’s Orkney also rations disembarkation, as cruise passengers have doubled its tourist influx, leading to pandemonium at its ancient religious and archaeological sites.
American ports, too, are moving against ships whose passenger numbers can exceed the local population, and whose pollution levels dwarf that of the towns they visit.
In economic terms, this business is water, water everywhere, but there’s no trickle-down. As with the conference centre industry, tourist shipping’s fiscal benefits are almost entirely hermetically sealed, with money reticulating within the ship’s pre-paid services, and locations getting very little.
Canny operators also invest ashore, encouraging passengers to use their own affiliated restaurants and tourist businesses while docked.
Being seen as too big and successful is a remarkable problem for the industry to have, considering the pandemic once looked set to decimate it. Covid-19 overnight transformed the entire fleet into Typhoid Marys. Given scientists’ predictions that further pandemics are almost inevitable, it seemed possible that few travellers would ever cruise again.
Yet the business is growing stronger than ever. From 21 cruise ships in 1970, there are now between 300 and 515, depending on size classification, with up to 60 more over the next three years. Many will have a 5000-plus capacity, the Icon of the Seas carrying up to 10,000 people.
Like cargo transporters, tourist ships are growing in size, with the technical capacity to reach eight times the size of the Titanic – incidentally, another catastrophe which failed to deter the industry’s growth.
JP Morgan Research estimates it will comprise nearly 4% of the NZ$4 trillion global tourism market by 2028, with passenger numbers up 6% from 2019. Younger demographics have defied predictions, becoming enthusiastic cruise-liner customers.
Although clean battery- and hydrocarbon-powered cruising is growing, most liners are heavy greenhouse gas emitters, their output estimated at more than double that of the equivalent flights and hotels combined.
Zero-emissions lobbyist, the European Federation for Transport and the Environment, recently reported a 17% rise in CO₂ output from cruise ships from 2017-22, a period that included the pandemic standstill.
Unsurprisingly, shipping lines are lobbying for state funding for their emissions reductions, while also flagging freight and fare hikes.
Using a more Trumpian solution, some operators are buying or building their own ports, and even private islands where they can berth under their own rules and clip all the tickets. Carnival, for instance, has built Celebration Key on 26ha in the Bahamas, with an infinity pool and a choice of Carnival’s own lagoons, shops and restaurants – an enviable economic model.
In contrast, ports such as Nice have only one, rather inhospitable, means of forcing cruise ship visitors to spend in their streets, should they wish to take it: frisking them on the dock and confiscating all the napkin-wrapped tucker smuggled from the breakfast buffet.
