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

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 1...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Castillo Manzano, José I., López Valpuesta, Lourdes
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2018
País:España
Institución:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/147587
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/147587
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhm.2018.03.013
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Cruises
Satisfaction
Mega cruise ships
Online customer reviews
Descripción
Sumario: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