AN INVESTIGATION INTO SITE AND SITUATION - CRUISE SHIP PORTS

Cruise ports have specific site and situation requirements. Exactly wh at they are will vary according to whether they are home ports, ports of call or hybrid ports. This article suggests initially that port sit uation should dominate port site in explaining cruise port success, Tw o sources of information are used to explore this thesis. First, a con tent analysis is applied to cruise port advertising abstracts which ap peared in the 1995 Directory of the Seatrade Cruise Shipping Conventio n. Second, a questionnaire was sent to those ports represented at the convention asking them to rank the importance of factors considered to be site and situation related. Results from both show that ports reco gnise the importance of their site and situation in their promotion an d operations. However, it is not universal that one factor is seen as more important than the other; although there is a tendency for situat ion-related factors to dominate, For example, of the 30 ports respondi ng to the questionnaire, 19 ranked situation-related factors highest. Ports of call especially stress their situation.