Cruising The Sea Of Risks: The Impact Of Ship Countermeasures On Intentions To Cruise
Abstract
Cruise ships are one of the fastest growing industries in the tourism sector. Despite the promising future, the cruise industry is frequently challenged by major safety and security threats. Accordingly, multiple risks are found to be associated with cruising. These include onboard major crimes, sexual assault, fires, sea piracy, terrorist attacks, health problems, and infection outbreaks. Such risks have resulted in many bad experiences among passengers, injuries, and loss of life. As a floating resort, the closed environment of a conveniently flagged cruise ship, besides the complexity and the lack of safety and security measures can pose passengers to inevitable dangers, increasing the degree of their vulnerability when cruising. Although some protection measures have been implemented and followed to a certain degree, cruise ships are still devastated by major accidents and negative incidents. This has challenged the reputation of many cruise companies, thereby effecting their growing ability and profitability. Correspondingly, this study aims to investigate the impact of cruise ships safety and security measures on passengers’ purchase intention, through passengers’ safety and security perception. Following an exploratory analysis of all variables, this work is carried out using primary data, which have been quantitatively collected through self-administered questionnaires. The findings indicate that there is a strong correlation between the main three pairs of the aforementioned variables. The provided implications and recommendations can be highly beneficial for cruise operators and academia on how to best understand and determine the existence of the causal relationship between such variables.
Description
the cruise industry has been facing the problem of more frequent safety and security issues. The increase of such problems was reportedly linked to the rapid growth and large number of voyages. Besides, the physical and closed environment of a cruise ship creates several challenges for both cruise takers and operators (Vairo et al., 2017; Yuura et al., 2020). Consequently, multiple unwanted events had exposed passengers to inevitable dangers. This include onboard major crimes, sexual assault, fires, sea piracy, terrorist attacks, health problems, and infection outbreaks. The cruise industry keeps continually fighting to survive the loss of reputation in protecting its passengers and crew, especially after the Concordia’s accident and other major negative events. Yet, the rise of safety and security issues as seen with mismanagement, poor operation, and human errors have been a cause for concern. Along with all of the aforementioned events, cruise line companies are still ignoring the International Maritime Organization (IMO) guidelines and other related regulations. The country of registration of a ship refers to the Flag of Convenience (FOC). Reportedly, large number of cruise companies have re-flagged their ships in countries that are not subject to many international law and regulations. For example, multiple cruise ships were re-flagged in Panama, Malta, Liberia, and the Bahamas just for the sake of avoiding the law (Negret, 2016). Consequently, re-flagging a ship in foreign countries places cruise companies to be liable and subject to many existing safety and security issues (Wing, 2003). In fact, the vast majority of cruise companies choose to register their ships in poor countries that tend to have a history of braking law and regulations. Thus, the level of passengers’ safety and security can be determined by the ships’ country of registration.. Based upon an in-depth review and extensive search in journal databases and academic studies, there was a lack in exploring such measures in particular, and their influence on passengers’ safety/security perception and purchase intention combined. This was due to the insufficiency of empirical data and information on subjects of this sort (Baker, 2013; Mileski et al., 2014). Multiple previous studies tend to address cruise passengers’ safety and security perception and/or passengers’ purchase intention by singly analyzing variables other than safety and security measures. This include health risk (Holland et al., 2021; Castaldo et al., 2021), crime/attack risk (Le & Arcodia 2021; Peter, 2021), and accident/malfunction risk (Carter et al., 2019; Catalani et al., 2020). Worthwhile, this study offers a variety of additional values and contributions that are useful to both cruise operators and other relating academic literature.
Keywords
Cruise Ships, Risk, Safety at Sea, Security