The once luxurious, “only for the rich” type of holiday on board cruise liners has now become both more affordable as well as family-friendly. 

Taking into consideration that the number of cruise passengers carried worldwide has increased by around 22 million since the 2000s, it can be confirmed that this mode of travelling is an integral factor in relation to the current over-tourism phenomenon. 

The term over-tourism refers to the high influx of tourists/visitors to a particular destination at a specific time or period. 

Mechtild Rössler, director of world heritage at Unesco, has accused the cruise industry of poor standards and promoting the overcrowding that is destroying several of Europe’s cultural landmarks. 

As proven by the following real world examples, Malta’s beloved capital city of Valletta is next in line and well at risk of the aforementioned degradation should sustainable measures not be put into practice. 

“We can’t keep having more and more tourists. We can’t have small islands, with small communities, hosting one million tourists over a few months. There’s a danger of the infrastructure not being prepared, of it all becoming a huge boomerang if we only focus on numbers and don’t look at developing a more sustainable model of tourism” said Nikos Chrysogelos, a Greek politician. 

New laws and itinerary management schemes need to be enforced in order to truly achieve sustainability

Famous singer Adriano Celentano adequately summarised in a nutshell the negative effects of these cruise liners: “With the ignoble procession of 13 ships in the Venice lagoon comes the Eternal Funeral of the world’s beauties.” 

The protests taking place on the Balearic island of Mallorca as well as Barcelona are also key examples of how cruise liners not only outnumber the locals, but also create environmental impacts. 

Royal Caribbean Cruise Line’s new release, the Symphony of the Seas, can carry up to 6,700 passengers, and has been dubbed by the Spaniards as the ‘Terror of the Seas’. 

“Our islands need to put limits on the intensification of mass tourism. We do not want this monster (Symphony of the Seas) in our port,” raged the protesters during the campaign, while holding up banners declaring that “Mallorca will be the tomb of tourism” and “Stop pollution of the seas”. 

The government officials believe that the only solution to the above-stated impacts would only be if better slot management would be put into action rather than having six of these mega ships arriving at the same time. 

The Balearic Group of Ornithology and Defence of Nature (GOB) agreed with these protests by saying that “cruise liners pollute the air, destroy local people’s health, contaminate the sea and produce more traffic on the roads”. According to Ugo Savino, senior manager of itinerary strategy and planning at Carnival Cruise Line: “A destination is a function of two factors: awareness and appeal; how much the people know it, and how much they want to visit it.”

Although the marketing of a destination is an essential component when it comes to the discussion of this phenomenon, it is actually the planning of the vessel’s route made by the individual companies that needs to be addressed.

Photo: Matthew Mirabelli

 More often than not, a cruise itinerary works hand in hand with the airports, in order to accommodate the so-called fly-and-cruise scheme. This means that the homeports, such as Barcelona and Civitavecchia, are usually visited on Fridays, Saturdays or Sundays as a result of the unchangeable determinant being flight scheduling.

Owing to this fact, most vessels end up visiting smaller islands which serve as a ‘resting point’ like Malta and Santorini mid-week, such as on a Wednesday in the case of Valletta. These elements create an unbeknown accordance between cruise liners with respect to visiting the same places on the same days and at roughly the same times. 

Do we want too want to end up like this? 

What do the locals think about having four vessels berthed in the Grand Harbour with an average of 16,000 passengers/crew members disgorged into our capital city? By 2025, at least another 15 mega cruise ships will be released, and they are not getting any smaller, with the passenger carrying capacity anticipated to even exceed the 7,500 figure. 

Rather than challenging the companies, some port authorities, the Valletta Waterfront included with the Pinto Wharf expansion project, are even renovating their ports so as to accommodate the vessels. 

The money these ships bring for the government will in no way compensate for the degradation of the citizens’ quality of life. New laws and itinerary management schemes need to be enforced in order to truly achieve sustainability in this mode of tourism.

The cruise industry has been the fasting growing of its kind in the world of tourism, and to say that desperate measures need to be put into action now is an understatement.

Denise Cassar is a first year University of Malta student reading for a degree in Tourism Studies with the ambition to specialise in cruise ship tourism.

This is a Times of Malta print opinion piece.