What does cruise passengers’ satisfaction depend on? Does size really matter?

Abstract

In a market characterized by gigantism and the trend toward the Las Vegas resort concept, our paper seeks to analyze passenger satisfaction when faced with the dilemma of a wider array of facilities and services, but at the cost of a cruise “en masse”. A sample of 105 thousand passenger ratings of 134 vessels and 9 different cruise brands reveals a clear negative relationship between passenger satisfaction and vessels’ gigantism and, to a lesser extent, modern design. Satisfaction also seems to significantly depend on three groups of factors: the cruise line experience; the vessel’s intrinsic characteristics, although its construction cost has no effect, and passengers’ own profiles: their ratings clearly depend on their motivations for choosing a particular cruise but are not influenced by expert opinion of the vessel. So, predicting customer satisfaction for such a complex tourism product is a challenge for future planning in this sector