Cruise Tourism in Gran Canaria
NHL STENDEN UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED SCIENCES
LECTURER: JASON KOBELSKI OLSZEWSKI
Emmy de Boer | ITM 1H | 4868544 | April, 2021
, IMPACTS OF CRUISE TOURISM ON GRAN CANARIA
TABLE OF CONTENT
INTRODUCTION......................................................................................... 2
CHARACTERISTICS OF CRUISE TOURISM...............................................2
IMPACTS ON THE LOCAL COMMUNITIES...............................................3
POSITIVE IMPACTS ON THE LOCAL COMMUNITY IN GRAN CANARIA. 4
NEGATIVE IMPACTS ON THE LOCAL COMMUNITY IN GRAN CANARIA
.................................................................................................................... 5
CONCLUSION............................................................................................. 6
REFERENCES............................................................................................. 7
APPENDIX................................................................................................. 10
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, IMPACTS OF CRUISE TOURISM ON GRAN CANARIA
INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, Cruise tourism is considered to be a trend and the fastest growing market in the
tourism industry (Butler et al., 2010; Kovačić & Silveira, 2020; Papathanassis et al., 2012).
The Cruise ships changed from sea travel as transport to sea travel as leisure (Guiliano et al.,
2006). Over the last decade, the global cruise tourism industry increased with an annual rate
of 4.2%, from 17.8 million travellers in 2009 to 24.7 million in 2016 (Artal-Tur et al., 2018).
Furthermore, according to Tovar et al. (2020), in the year 2015 became the capital of Gran
Canaria, named Las Palmas, a popular cruise destination. The average number of cruise
passengers increased in the period of 1998-2008 from 17,458 passengers to 43,847 in the
period of 2008-2018. Compared to other types of tourism, cruise tourism has a big impact on
the local communities and this has not received much attention yet. Moreover, the local
community perception needs to receive attention when regulating sustainable cruise tourism
(Hung et al., 2019; Sun et al., 2018). Therefore, this paper intends to examine the impacts of
cruise tourism on the local community in Gran Canaria.
After this introduction, the paper is organised as follows. Section 1 undertakes, the
characteristics of cruise tourism to get an insight into cruise tourism and its definitions.
Afterward, section 2 goes about the impact of cruise tourism on the local communities, to
gain general information about cruise tourism globally. To narrow it down to the Gran
Canaria, section 3 presents the positive impacts on the local community in Gran Canaria,
followed by the negative impacts in section 4. Finally, the conclusion is presented in section
5, which will answer the problem statement.
CHARACTERISTICS OF CRUISE TOURISM
This section aims to provide a theoretical basis of cruise tourism to define the definition from
one perspective. To understand the characteristics of cruise tourism it is necessary to review
different definitions.
The number of tourists from the cruise industry rose considerably in 2009 from 17.8 million
tourists to 30 million tourists in 2019 (CBI, 2021). However, also the global tourism sector
has increased significantly, with a prediction to remain growing till the international tourism
arrival of 1.8 billion by 2030 (UNWTO, 2016). In particular, the cruise industry and its
passengers make up a great share due to the fact that the cruise routes visit multiple countries.
According to the UNWTO (2016), cruise tourism is defined as “bringing [a] large number of
people to concentrated areas of destination for brief periods”.
Cruise tourism contains a variety of different types of cruises and trips, a difference from
mega-ships to small yachts and from 48 hours to a few months (Papathanassis et al., 2012). It
is a tourism form which is described as an all-inclusive holiday on a ship, with a wide-ranging
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