The Cruise Ship Industry: A History of Luxury, Growth, and Environmental Impact

The term “cruising” derives from staying on a watercraft for an extended period. The term has been employed for smaller canoes or larger yachts and cruise ships. Over time, it came to be designated as a popular leisurely hobby. Since the middle of the twentieth century, large cruise ships have captured a large share of the tourist market yet have also created an adverse economic and environmental impact.

Leisure trips developed with the more significant interactions between Native American societies and European invaders during the eighteenth century. The latter took the notion of the canoe back to Europe, where canoe clubs started to develop at the start of the nineteenth century. In the same century, the wealthy class developed a fascination with yachts, creating associations, competitive racing, and, by the turn of the century, the first circumnavigation of the globe.

Royal Caribbean cruise ship Independence of the Seas near Nice, France (Ciolca/Dreamstime.com)

The development of the cruise ship, a vessel dedicated solely to relaxation, was equally, if not more, complex. The idea of developing such boats goes back to the first half of the nineteenth century when the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies offered ship cruises between Naples and Sicily in the 1830s. However, this endeavor, aimed exclusively at European aristocrats, did not deliver an economic windfall and was consequently abandoned. A booming cruise industry developed and benefited from the increasing passenger and cargo shipment across the Atlantic Ocean in the second half of the nineteenth century. The pull of newly emerging countries in North and South America converged with the development of fossil fuel-driven vessels, giving rise to several companies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The British-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company—P and O for short—developed cruises to the Mediterranean in the 1840s, capitalizing on a British monopoly over mail delivery to the area. In the Atlantic, several companies realized that their ships could be diverted to warmer regions during the cold winter season and briefly converted to cruise ships before returning to their original purpose. The Germany- based Hamburg America Line was the first company to commission the building of vessels entirely dedicated to cruising. Many companies, however, maintained the dual model of offering both transportation and cruise facilities. The Titanic was the best example of this design, offering first-class passengers grand ballrooms, while third-class passengers shared bunk beds. This vessel also illustrated that leisure was secondary to a speedy crossing of the Atlantic as the Titanic’s attempt to chase the Blue Riband—an unofficial price for the fastest transatlantic crossing—ended up in the fateful collision with an iceberg and the loss of over 1,500 lives.

The era of the ocean liners—ships designed for cargo and passenger transport—lasted from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. From the owners’ perspective of such liner businesses, directional transportation remained the main problem. While a few affluent first-class passengers may have opted for a round trip on such liners, most voyagers were immigrants seeking wealth and fortune in the new worlds of the Americas and Australia. In the early 1960s, the development of specialized container ships and, most importantly, jet aircraft made the ocean liner obsolete, forcing companies specializing in this trade to adapt, merge, or disappear. The container ship took over cargo transport with a skeleton crew, while jets made transporting passengers over long distances much faster and more affordable.

During the 1960s, many companies repurposed the old ocean liners to serve as cruise ships to reinvent the older cruise industry. By the 1970s, shipbuilding was redesigned to allow for vessels entirely built from the ground up for leisure. Culturally, the reinvented cruise industry received a boost from the popular TV series The Love Boat, which ran for nine seasons from 1977 to 1986. Translated into many languages, this series sold cruising as a fantasy destination. The 1980s saw the cruise industry triple its numbers, and profits increased when slot machines and casinos were added to the vessels. Shorter cruises that lasted only three to four days were also introduced during the same decade. In the 1990s, the average capacity of cruise ships went from 1,500 to 2,500 passengers, significantly contributing to an annual increase in this tourist industry of roughly seven percent. The terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, negatively influenced the industry as fewer people were willing to fly to the ports from where the cruise ships departed. In the United States, the industry reacted by opening more ports and expanding beyond Florida, on the east and west coasts, and along the Gulf of Mexico.

The seemingly unhindered growth of the cruise industry came to a grinding halt with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Since the Coronavirus is airborne, it thrives in the enclosed and crowded environment that cruise ship provides. The ordeal of the Diamond Princess being quarantined for a month in Yokohama harbor in February 2020, without allowing crew and passengers to disembark, is the best example. The rapid shutdowns worldwide greatly affected the cruise ship industry, which shut down for nearly fifteen months. What almost became a deadly blow to the industry became a wake-up call, and most cruise lines, after allowing passengers to board their ships again, are now requiring, without exception, passengers to be fully vaccinated. Such restrictions, however, were lowered again as countries dropped their Covid-19 vaccination requirements for arriving travelers.

Nevertheless, the rebounding cruise ship industry faces severe criticism from climate activists and authorities hailing from port cities, seemingly drowning in passengers. Called “floating hotels, cities” or “battleships for pleasure,” the number of passengers on one ship has now increased to an average of 3,500—with the largest vessel, Wonder of the Sea, holding 7,000. Even a medium-sized ship produces as many greenhouse gases as 12,000 cars. By 2017, it was estimated that cruise ships docking in Europe produced ten times the sulfur dioxide as the continent’s 260 million cars. Only smaller cruise companies have committed to eschewing fossil fuels for alternative, primarily solar, energies.

There are currently no batteries potent enough to power mega cruise liners that house 5,000 or more passengers. More prominent cruise lines increasingly rely on liquid nitrogen to power their ships, which lowers emissions by 30 percent compared to traditional diesel fuel. Such ships are still far from carbon-neutral, and their ports of call are increasingly hostile towards their arrival. Not only are these vessels contributing to the port’s pollution, but authorities also lament that passengers who enjoy their stay and complimentary meals on the vessel contribute little to the city’s economy. Although cruise companies claim that their customers spend an average of 100 dollars a day in every port of call, a more neutral study investigating the impact of cruises on the famous destination in Bergen, Norway, claims otherwise. This study found that only 60 percent of cruise passengers leave their ships, and half of those who do spend less than $25. Weighing the cost of pollution and overcrowding against the potential income of their city, officials of many European municipalities are now seeking to limit the number of vessels, especially mega cruise ships. Such measures have already took effect in Amsterdam, Dublin, Dubrovnik, Palma de Mallorca, and Venice, with many other cities soon to follow their example. Rainer F. Buschmann

FURTHER READING:Aarnio, Markus. 2023. Cruise Ship Handbook. Cham: Springer Nature.

Barnes, Oliver. 2022. “The Cruise Ship Conflict. Europe’s Port Cities vs. Floating Hotels.” Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/9f261daa-dabb-4549-82da-67d01026f099. Accessed October 1, 2023.

De la Garza, Alejandro. 2023. “The Cruise Industry is on Course for Climate Disaster.” Time Magazin. https://time.com/6285915/cruise-industry-climate-action-emissions-passengers/. Accessed October 1, 2023.

Garin, Christopher. 2006. Devils on the Deep Blue Sea: The Dreams, Schemes and Showdowns that Build America’s Cruise Ship Empire. New York: Penguin.

National Public Radio. 2023. “COVID Nearly Sunk the Cruise Industry. Now It’s Trying to Make a Comeback.” https://www.npr.org/2023/08/15/1193929222/covid-nearly-sunk-the-cruise -industry-now-its-trying-to-make-a-comeback. Accessed September 30, 2023.

Veronneau, Simon and Jacques Roy. 2012. “Cruise Lines and Passengers.” In The Blackwell Companion to Maritime Economics, edited by Wayne K. Talley. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 138-60.COASTAL EROSION AND DEPOSITION