Can someone refresh me again on why we don’t like the cruise industry?

A couple of different posts on here today (and my reaction to them) got me thinking about this again today. I’m a card carry member of the Adventure Travel side of the industry. The place where we do things right - small groups, low impact, community consultation, minimise leakage and so on. By default we’ve always looked on the cruise industry as the opposite.

However, when we travel to fragile areas like Antractica or the Galapagos, we put our travellers, en masse, on big boats. Of course we say our big boats are smaller than the cruise ship big boats - so we are all a-OK. But from this can we therefore say it isn’t the type of transport that is the problem?

Companies like Hurtigruten are building electric ships. So like the electric trains we champion as being the more responsible way to travel than flying, when electrifying big ships sorts itself out (likely decades before flying finds a solution) does that make cruising actually more responsible than even adventure travel?

Big groups overwhelming small communities is the next item on the naughty list. When running Australian product for Intrepid for a while I remember having a meeting with an awesome bunch of people from Easetern Arnhem Land in the north of Australia. They were in a fairly remote place but you could get there by road. To date their main forae into tourism was a twice annual visit from a “small ship” cruise company. All 250 passengers would descend on the coastal town for half a day. Yuck. We proposed our solution of small groups of maximum 12 people who would come every fortnight over the 6 month season and stay for a full 3 days to really immerse ourselves in their culture. Their reward would be about 60% of the two cruise ship visits. They told us no thanks. They didn’t want that type of frequent disruption but if we ever wanted to follow the “small ship” route and drop in very infrequently with large numbers - we are welcome back anytime. Was this just an outlier? If we were to adjust frequency in destinations does that markedly improve the cruise industry?

I recall more than a decade ago - the Intrepid co-Founder Darrell W. telling me about a book he was reading I think called, Devils onthe Deep Blue Sea. It was an expose on the cruise industry. I need to go back and read it (or re-read it). I do recall tales of garbage being dumped overboard etc but I think the days of social media have changed those practices by & large as it wasn’t the type of social media exposure cruise brands were looking for. If we can assume those issues are fixed then the next in line is leakage.

The all encompassing nature of the business model of cruise to wring every last cent out of their captured passenger forsaking all others, including local suppliers is one I’ve lived through. Urban Adventures approached every cruise line and port operator (who had bought the exclusive rights from the cruise line to service their customers in contracts worth millions per destination) and found it was pretty much a closed shop. Even those wanting to be seen to be supporting local economies couldn’t be satisfied in the end to really endorse products outside the main money making machine where shareholder value trumps all else. So here is a problem not yet addressed BUT this is a simple business model and business values issue. Is a cruise operator dedidcated equally to profit and purpose actually better than a lot of other business models inluding adventure tourism? Follow-up question to that is that I know building boats isn't cheap, so can an ethical cruise operator be a sufficiently profitable company? I'll answer my own question by pointing again to Antartica and Galapagos.

In more offbeat coastal destinations you need somewhere for the travellers to sleep. The options therefore are camp, build infrastructure or stay off shore like on boat. Given the market for those willing to stay in a minimalist camp is tiny, then which of the other two is the worse evil long term? Most local communities dont have an individual who support the development so inevitable the money comes from outside and the money gets…………….. yep you guessed it, leaked. Alongside this the environment needs to be altered to cater for the new transient population. Fresh water supplies get tapped and so on.

I’m sure there is a tonne I’m missing here but is an ethical electric cruise line actually one of the best things that could happen in tourism? Living in Australia and the distances we need to cover to get anywhere, I can’t help think the flight problem will never have a reasonable solution. But what if we went back to the future and make sea the default way to exit and enter on electric powered ships?

I acknowledge this doesn’t touch on the problems for places like Venice & Amsterdam etc where the cruise influx is just all downside really. An ethical cruise line wouldn’t go there I’d imagine so that is my solution to those (pre-empted) comments but I do absolutely acknowledge those issues.

Thoughts?