The Cruise Lines Association draws an optimistic scenario for cruise, and points out the fastest growing market is in Asia, where Chinese are the main force. Cruise travelling, as a new economic engine, is developing rapidly in China. However, among all the cruise terminals in China mainland, WSICT is the sole profitable port. Serious leakages of cruise industry are considered as the cause. What result in the leakage? In this thesis, a cruise value chain is proposed, covering main stages from planning to shore visiting. By tracking the cash flow in the value chain, potential sources of leakage are come up and then verified in the case study of Shanghai, where two typical companies, WSICT and Ctrip, are further analyzed. The investigation reveals some Chinese-Styled characters, such as “Retailer charter selling”, “packaged cruise products” and Chinese passengers’ preferences. All these factors impact on the value chain differently. The results implicate severe leakages in cruise planning, visiting and shopping. The preliminary success of WSICT could be attributed to its earliest participation into cruise, and geographical advantages. For travel agency like Ctrip, the typical retailer charter selling entitles them the right to design products, so they add extra services such as insurance and shore visiting to enhance profits. Totally, except for port companies and travel intermediaries, limited local communities participate in cruise industry. Hence, more positive policies are essential to motivate local communities.

This thesis addresses the lack of available research regarding consumer perceptions of sustainability in the cruise industry. The study was conducted by administering an anonymous online survey with cruise message board participants and social media users. The survey was available to all consumers, including consumers who have not cruised. The survey focused on general reasons a consumer books a cruise, consumer travel behaviors, sustainability of the cruise industry, and sustainable factors that may impact a consumers’ choice of a cruise line. The goal of this research was to determine any patterns and trends that may emerge regarding consumer perceptions. The findings of the study showed cruise history and demographics have influenced consumer views on sustainability in the cruise industry.

As the cruise industry continues to grow at a rapid pace, additional qualifications for its management personnel are becoming increasingly important. Many new ships are built each year, leaving a void in experienced personnel. Additionally, some leave the ships in order to improve professional qualifications on shore. Whereas many of the companies are training personnel onboard using on-the-job training, the concepts addressed in college-level management programs remain lacking. The goal was to implement and evaluate delivery of formal coursework to English-speaking, multicultural cruise ship personnel onboard by using emerging technologies that are available today. College-level management courses using Web 2.0 technologies were designed, delivered and evaluated. Two courses were offered each was split into two groups using different technologies. Group 1 used non-emerging technologies via a web page with additional material to support the textbook. This group also used discussion forums, online quizzes and tests and online grade book. Group 2 used the same features as the first and Web 2.0 technologies including Wikis, blogs, vodcasts, YouTube.com video clips, and synchronous Instant Messaging. Both groups had intense, positive distant interactions with faculty and had comparable outcomes. The least effective technology was the wiki and the most, the Discussion Forum. The finding was that the cruise industry may well have developed a distinct culture is an important one that may well lead to a better understanding of acculturation. Three weeks proved an ideal length of time for students to complete the 1.5-credit courses. Dividing 4.5-credit courses into 1.5-modules proved successful. Out of the original 249 applicants, 162 students participated from 36 different countries located on 64 different ships around the world.

Research is limited on the role game-based training has on the engagement of learners. The following study was conducted to further advance research on engagement and game-based training in businesses by studying the engagement of travel agents in the game. Engagement is the manner in which a learner's cognitive and motor skills are motivated when participating in a game. Engaged learners will often push through challenging tasks and will concentrate on improving their skills due to their excitement about playing. The present study examined the engagement of travel agents as they played a serious game. The serious game, Adventures Game, was designed to provide a fun and memorable format for learning for travel agents who sell cruise tickets for a cruise line. The focus of this study was to examine the relationship between engagement (as measured by total number of minutes playing the game) and knowledge attainment (as measured by total number of fun points) of travel agents while playing a serious game. In addition, to understand the relationship between engagement and total cruise sales (as measured by total number of cabins sold). Thus, this nonexperimental study investigated the relationship between engagement and knowledge attainment. A combination of linear regression analyses and correlations were used to examine this relationship. The sample consisted of travel agents (N = 309) who played the serious game. The study focused on data which ranged from January 1, 2012 until December 31, 2014. The regression results supported both hypotheses proposed in this study. A strong, positive and statistically significant relationship between engagement and knowledge attainment was found. In addition, a modest, positive and statistically significant relationship between engagement and total cabin sales was found. Based on these results, further analysis was conducted, leading to finding a statistically significant relationship between knowledge attainment and total cabin sales as well. Future research should be designed to test whether the modest link between engagement and total cabin sales is mediated by knowledge attainment. The implications of the findings demonstrate theoretical, empirical and practical relevance, particularly as it is linked to adults learning optimally in computer-mediated, workplace settings.

This final thesis deals with cruises and cruise line industry in general. The first chapter describes cruises and highlights their particulars. The second chapter analyzes all the available statistics (secondary data) that depict the role of cruise line industry in the field of tourism (fleet, cruise lines, passengers, destinations, ports, economic impact). As for the primary research, I created a questionnaire to determine the requirements of respondents for an ideal cruise. I have conducted a mystery shopping, together with a personal interview with an employee of an travel agent's to analyze the state of the market and the sale of cruises both in Czech and Slovak Republic. The last chapter discusses the current and future trends in the cruise industry. The results of this thesis confirm the hypothesis that Czech Republic and Slovakia have the potential to attract customers and bring potential customers.

Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian—the most profitable cruise lines today—emerged between the late 1960s and early 1970s, as the elitist leisure ocean travel industry attempted to recover from economic downturn. These mass-market lines targeted an American middle class that increasingly had the desire and financial means to travel. They secured much of this untapped market by creating packaged vacations that responded to the needs and tastes of a middle-class clientele. Drawing on cruise advertisements, newspaper articles, ephemera, industry documents, travel writing, and memorabilia books, this dissertation analyzes how these three companies used cultural and geographic referents to produce cruise vacations, responding to an increased consumer interest in cultural sampling as an accruement of economic globalization. Findings suggest that cruise ships offered their owners a space to arrange simulated interactions with global cultures—a practice that soon extended to Caribbean cruise ports as these companies gained the market power to influence encounters there. This complex collision of global cultures was advanced by a goal to offer passengers opportunities to discover new worlds. However, many of the cultural representations displayed on cruise ships were pastiches—essentializations drawn from popular media forms and based in Eurocentrism. These were meant to be entertaining, not accurate, representations. Nevertheless, as themed environments gained momentum, these cultural forms helped to transform ships into destinations in their own right—a process through which cruise lines produced a captive audience to siphon passenger spending from the Caribbean. At the same time, cruise lines leveraged their mediating power and economic influence to hide from passengers the supposed poverty, crime, and disease at Caribbean ports, and even the mundanities of daily life there, while increasingly installing mechanisms to appropriate spending from those who chose to debark the ship. These processes intensified as the decades advanced. This study thus finds that cultural homogenization did not result in an immediately apparent reduction of difference, because difference was profitable and central to the mass-market cruise industry’s advertising strategies. However, the surface-level cultural heterogeneity that cruises offered was reduced through a homogenizing vision that balanced novelty with passenger comfort, engagement, and convenience in support of corporate profits. The resulting cultural production process was not suggestive of glocalization, but rather a new phenomenon meriting further research.