Cruise passengers value in seaport destination: an empirical analysis

The relentless growth of the cruise passenger flows that in the past years has invested the Mediterranean area has required the improvement of seaport infrastructures. The port reforms have fostered the involvement of cruise companies in the management of maritime stations, in order to enhance port efficiency and service quality, as well as to decrease costs and prices. This condition if, on the one hand, ensures traffic flows to seaports, on the other, it could dissuade the cruise companies that are not shareholders of the cruise terminal concessionaire to include the port in their own itineraries. The knowledge of the passengers’ satisfaction and their expenditure on the port destination becomes a fundamental issue for the concessionaires of maritime stations that want to assume an active role in the increase of the traffic flow. The purpose of this paper is to identify the main drivers of cruise passengers’ satisfaction and to measure the value created by cruisers in a specific destination. The work wants investigate these dimensions in smaller ports where the maritime stations are managed by concessionaires that do not have cruise companies in the ownership structure. More specifically, it will provide the knowledge on the passengers value of cruise companies that will not become shareholders of the concessionaire if the maritime station is entrusted to other cruise companies. The measurement of value creation is conducted through the elaboration of structured questionnaires submitted to a sample of passengers on one of the main cruise companies operating in Mediterranean