Environmental Sustainability and the Future of the Cruise Tourism

Cruise tourism is one of the growing segments in international tourism industry. Previous research have studied the economic and cultural impacts of tourism industry throughout the world, especially the major cruise tourism areas including the countries in Caribbean region, which accounts for the 50% of total world capacity placement (Dwyer & Forsyth, 1998), such as Costa Rica (Brida & Zapata, 2010), Jamaica (Chase & McKee, 2003), as well as Europe (Dragin, Jovičći & Bošković, 2010) and Australia (Dwyer & Forsyth, 1996). Historically, cruise tourism has developed in a commercial sense from the early 1880s in Pacific region by tour offerings of shipping companies for leisure tour which are irrelevant from their regular trade routes (Steel, 2016). On the other hand, studies related to sustainability of cruise tourism on the basis of environmental considerations have been limited to first-order effects on the ecosystem, but the second phase of the research linking these impacts to tourism does not exist (Moreno & Amelung, 2009). There are numerous impacts of cruise tourism on environmental degradation. As Uebersax (1996) describes, a complex downside to the cruise industry includes pollution of sea floors, harbors and coastal areas; degradation of scarce water resources; destruction of coral reef habitat; public health concerns ashore; and pressures resulting from waste disposal problems for communities that are already unable to deal with their own domestic commercial municipal waste. Yet, no further research has been done to explain the impacts of these environmental problems created by cruise tourism on the future of cruise tourism itself. In this manuscript, it has been aimed to focus on the environmental degradation with respect to cruise tourism industry and the results of this environmental degradation on the future of cruise tourism. It will start with introducing possible threats of cruise industry to the environmental sustainability and then it will move to discuss the real-world reflections of these threats to the future of cruise tourism and tourist preferences