Cruise Tourism in the Caribbean

Selling Sunshine

Martha Honey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429515293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Hospitality, Travel & Tourism Industry
• Index: Business

This book explores the lessons learned from half a century of Caribbean cruise tourism; one of the most popular and profitable sectors of the tourism industry.

The modern-day cruise industry dates from the 1960s when the three major cruise lines, Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian, set up shop in Florida and began selling winter cruises to the Caribbean targeting American retirees. For geopolitical reasons, the US initially excluded cruises to Cuba. This changed in 2016, following the historic Obama-Castro agreement to move towards diplomatic, trade and travel normalization. Cuba quickly became the Caribbean's fastest growing cruise destination.

This book considers the limited economic benefits of cruise tourism, its environmental and social impacts, and the effects of climate change, and "overtourism." Based on this analysis and case studies of key Caribbean and Mediterranean destinations, this book cautions against overdependence on cruise tourism and outlines reforms needed to bring more benefits and equity to Caribbean countries. It will be valuable to professionals, businesses, development agencies, NGOs, and academics interested in a sustainable cruise industry and the economic well-being of Caribbean island nations.

1
Introduction

Martha Honey

The origins of this book trace from May 2, 2016, the day that the Adonia, the single ship in Carnival Cruise Line’s newly created Fathom fleet, docked in Havana harbor. This marked the official end of Cuba’s half century of exclusion from the massive Caribbean cruise network, based in Florida and dominated by three US mega lines. The modern-day cruise industry in the Caribbean dates from the 1960s and 1970s, when Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian cruise lines first set up shop in Florida and began “selling sunshine” – winter month cruises in the Caribbean – to North American snowbirds and retirees. Creation of this new Caribbean cruise network roughly coincided with the Revolution in Cuba and the severing of diplomatic relations between Havana and Washington in the early 1960s. Over the next half century, as the Caribbean grew into the world’s leading cruise market, Cuba, the largest, closest, and perhaps most alluring island cruise destination, was excluded.

By coincidence, I was in Havana the day the Adonia docked, and I experienced the excitement and anticipation of many Cubans who welcomed the American cruise ship as the harbinger of better days to come. Small crowds gathered to cheer the 700-odd, overwhelmingly American passengers, as they filed off the ship and were led by Cuban tour guides into the heart of Old Havana. It was as if this city, so long a taboo for US travelers, had been breached by a phalanx of cheerful, boisterous, tee-shirt clad, everyday Americans. This seemingly modest but enormously consequential event was part of a cascade of changes that followed the December 2014 accords between Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro to move towards “normalizing” relations. The easing of restrictions unleashed a tourism “tsunami,” with US visitors to Cuba increasing more than 75 percent in both 2015 and 2016. Tourism to Cuba quickly became the fastest growing market in the Caribbean. Most arrived by plane as stayover visitors, but by 2017, Cuba was also receiving some four dozen cruise ships, including ships from all major US cruise lines.

I was in Cuba with a small group of American friends, family, and colleagues for what is officially called a “people-to-people” exchange. During our week in Cuba, we stayed in local B&Bs (casas particulares); ate in home restaurants (paladares); met with a fascinating array of political analysts, economists, doctors, urban planners, academics, and other professionals; took salsa lessons; and attended beautiful dance and musical performances. We’d been guided through Havana’s cultural and historic landmarks and out into the countryside to some of Cuba’s stunning ecotourism offerings. On our long bus rides, our Cuban guide tolerated our curiosities with patience and humor and seemed willing to discuss anything, no matter how politically sensitive. This was small-scale, intimate, enriching, engaging, and relatively low-key travel.

Cruise tourism felt cut of a different mold: industrial scale, carefully choreographed, fast paced, high profile. The Cuban government opted to allow cruise tourism in addition to its rapidly expanding stayover tourism sector because they viewed it as a way to quickly capture some foreign exchange and as a vehicle for introducing large numbers of Americans to modern-day Cuba. The central question for Cubans was whether cruise tourism could significantly help the island’s ailing economy, bringing income and jobs to Cuban households and foreign exchange to government coffers and State-financed social services. What, in essence, would be the impact – the costs and benefits – of cruise tourism for Cuba? And how would cruise tourism stack up compared with various types of stayover tourism, including most importantly small scale “people-to-people” nature-based and cultural tourism and large-scale, all-inclusive beach resorts, dominated by package tours from Canada and Europe? These were the questions being quietly discussed by discerning Cubans, and they are a central focus of this book.

To undertake this study, the Center for Responsible Travel (CREST) put together a team of researchers, including, in addition to myself, Rafael Betancourt, an economist and professor based in Havana; José Luis Perelló, a leading professor of tourism at the University of Havana; and Jannelle Wilkins, a CREST consultant based in Costa Rica. Our initial intention was to analyze the history of 50 years of cruise tourism in the Caribbean to help provide insights for Cuban policy makers. The Spanish edition of our study (Por el Mar de las Antillas: 50 Años de Turismo de Cruceros en el Caribe),¹ published in Cuba by Ediciones Temas in April 2018, was centered around lessons learned for Cuba.

In undertaking this English language version, we have looked through a somewhat wider lens in an effort to make the book applicable to destinations across the Caribbean and even beyond. This study pulls together a wide range of data and research about cruise tourism impacts that may be useful to destinations as they seek to evaluate their engagement with this increasingly powerful, mass-market tourism sector. In addition to overviews of the structure, business model, and operations of the cruise industry, we also examine the economic, socio-cultural, and environmental impacts of cruise tourism in the Caribbean and other relevant destinations. Through case studies of several leading destinations, we further illuminate the benefits and challenges of cruise tourism. Lastly, we conclude with a summary of the lessons learned for how countries might more effectively negotiate their terms of engagement with cruise lines.

This book is being completed after a far-right populist, Donald Trump, became the US president and began rolling back key reforms initiated by Presidents Obama and Raúl Castro. On June 16, 2017, President Trump flew to Miami’s Little Havana, the heart of the Cuban-American exile community, to announce his administration was imposing new restrictions to stop US citizens from engaging in individual “people-to-people” travel to Cuba. Over the next two years, the Trump administration issued a series of directives to further tighten US trade, travel, and investment with the island. Then on June 4, 2019, the Treasury Department ordered an immediate halt to all cruise travel as well as all group people-to-people education travel to Cuba. On June 5, all the major US cruise lines announced they were removing Cuba from their itineraries, affecting, according to the CLIA (Cruise Lines International Association) nearly 800,000 passenger bookings already scheduled or underway. President Trump’s directives and the subsequent regulations were widely viewed as fulfilling a campaign pledge to a handful of hardline, anti-Castro Cuban-Americans. They came even as public opinion polls showed that some 81 percent of Americans supported free travel to Cuba, including 74 percent of Cuban-Americans. As Cuba expert Peter Kornbluh wrote in an article in The Nation magazine, “In both tone and substance, Trump’s new policy will undercut the Obama administration’s meticulous efforts to open a new era of civil and respectful bilateral relations between Washington and Havana.”²

While Cuba’s entry into – and exit from – the US cruise market is the hook for this book, it is the rising public concern about two other phenomena – climate change and overtourism – that have come to the fore recently, forcing us to take a more profound and multi-dimensional look at the cruise industry. Specifically, in the summer and fall of 2017, the eastern Caribbean, Cuba, and parts of the southern US coastline were battered by Hurricanes Maria and Irma, twin “once-in-a-century” super storms, which scientists linked irrefutably to climate change. Their back-to-back paths of destruction devastated island and coastal economies, demolishing infrastructure and closing cruise ports, diverting cruise ships, and disrupting cruise itineraries for many months. By the close of 2018, Puerto Rico, the worst hit destination, is still far from recovery. Cuba, on the other hand, rebuilt its hotels and other tourism infrastructure damaged by Irma in just a few months.

Meanwhile, around the Mediterranean, historic port cities, including Venice and Barcelona, were being buffeted by waves of anti-tourism marches and protests, much of it centered around cruise tourism. The concept of “overtourism” suddenly became a highly visible and frightening force facing historic cities, as well as other popular, fragile tourism sites – beaches, parks, and protected areas, World Heritage Sites, and even some entire regional and national destinations. These visible and vocal protests in iconic European cities butted up against the central tourism tenet that success is measured by increased visitor numbers. Indeed, the cruise industry thrives on continual and largely uncontrolled growth, in numbers and size of ships, more passengers, and more ports. Now European governments, spearheaded by Barcelona, are striving to find ways to put on the brakes, to limit the numbers and manage flows of cruise passengers and other short-term visitors. All of this appears as a harbinger – a warning sign – for what popular port cities in the Americas will face unless overtourism, including cruise tourism, is recalibrated. In integrating these issues into this book, we are therefore looking both backwards at lessons learned from a half century of cruise tourism in the Caribbean and forward at the emerging twin threats of climate change and overtourism, which are making it imperative that we rethink and reform how the cruise industry operates.

Notes

1 Center for Responsible Travel. “What We Do: Books.” www.responsibletravel.org/whatWeDo/books.php.

2 Peter Kornbluh. (June 2, 2017). “Trump Threatens to Rescind Obama’s Cuba Engagement: and Activists Fight Back.” The Nation. www.thenation.com/article/trump-threatens-rescind-obamas-cuba-engagement-activists-fight-back/.

2
History and Growth of Cruise Tourism

Martha Honey

In the mind of most Americans, international cruise tourism dates from the Titanic’s star-crossed 1912 transatlantic voyage. However, the creation story of the modern cruise industry, writes Elizabeth Becker in Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism, really dates from 1966. That’s the year that Ted Arison, the son of a multimillionaire shipping magnate, emigrated from Israel to Miami and founded, together with Knut Kloster, a Norwegian shipping magnate, what became Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL). Arison soon left to found Carnival Cruise Line, while Kloster acquired additional ships for Norwegian’s expansion in the Caribbean.¹ According to a United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) study, “NCL revolutionized the cruise industry with the introduction of the ‘single-class’ embarkation concept, offering destinations in the Caribbean and a setting of informal luxury.”² With the Caribbean cruise industry based in Southern Florida, this state became, as Becker details in her popular examination of the tourism industry, “the petri dish for developing mass tourism,” as Miami’s retirees and snowbirds from the north flocked on board the first cruise ships heading for the Caribbean.³ While the Titanic was an ocean liner designed to transport passengers between Europe and the US, with the advent of long-haul airplanes, ocean liners lost their luster as a mode of transport. Instead, they were reinvented as vacation cruise ships centered in the Caribbean, which offered a mix of onboard and onshore vacation activities.

There’s another difference between these old and new pleasure crafts: the Titanics of the industry catered to the crème de la crème in the US and Europe, while Carnival Cruise Line and the other mega lines operating in the Caribbean offered vacations for “every man.” They marketed their affordable vacations using a highly competitive business model that depended on the US market but avoided many US laws and regulations through legal loopholes in maritime law. To appeal to the mass market, the cruise sector “developed a business model reflecting the mobility of its assets: the cruise industry sells itineraries, not destinations, implying a greater flexibility in the selection of ports of call and adaptability to changing market conditions.”⁴ In addition, cruise lines adjust their prices to keep occupancy close to full. In 2013, after a string of accidents at sea sent consumer confidence tumbling, Carnival’s chief executive officer, Arnold Donald, explained how the cruise line could afford to drastically slash fares: “It’s not what the passengers pay to book their cruise that counts,” Donald told CBS News, “it’s what they spend once they’re on board that moves the bottom line.”⁵

The growth of the Caribbean cruise tourism industry has both mirrored worldwide trends and been subject to its own economic, geographic, and political forces. Following the 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington DC, cruise lines pulled some ships out of the Mediterranean and redeployed them in the Caribbean. Capitalizing on the region’s image as a safe, terror-free travel destination, the cruise lines offered discounts to attract a wider clientele, opened new departure ports in the US, and expanded the ports of call in Mexico and the Caribbean. Based on the public’s post-9/11 fear of flying, the cruise lines created new home ports and ports of call along US coastlines, including Baltimore, New York, Houston, Galveston, New Orleans, Portland and Bar Harbor (Maine), San Francisco, and Charleston (South Carolina). As one cruise executive who worked on establishing these new home ports explained in an anonymous interview,

After 9/11 we realized there [was] an opportunity. We [could] move our ships to home ports located near large population centers. This is an advantage of having a moveable asset: a ship. So, the industry moved ships to some 30 new North American ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 History and growth of cruise tourism
• 3 The economic model and impacts of cruise tourism
• 4 Environmental “footprint” of the cruise industry
• 5 Cruise tourism impacts on historic cities
• 6 Cuba: a long and mixed engagement with cruise tourism
• 7 The Dominican Republic: a Caribbean tourist mecca
• 8 Costa Rica: cruise tourism competes with ecotourism
• 9 Bermuda: an important experiment in managing cruise tourism
• 10 Conclusions: lessons learned and recommendations
• Glossary
• Index