Residents’ perceptions of cruise tourism in an overcrowded city The case of Venice

Abstract

Tourism is one of the most important industries in Europe: it represents 10% of the European Union GDP and 12 million people are employed in this sector (UNWTO, 2018). Due to its important contribution to the economy and its impact on the community, it affects the everyday life of residents, both in a positive and negative way. Within the industry, cruise tourism is the fastest growing segment of leisure tourism (Klein, 2011). In the last twenty years, the cruise sector has increased significantly, amounting to 24.7 million passengers in 2016 (CLIA, 2018) and employing 1,021,681 people around the world (BREA, 2017). Further, the cruise sector produces $57.9 billion in direct expenditures, thus creating a total economic output of $125.96 billion worldwide. In this scenario, academic research has devoted to analyze the residents’ perceptions and attitudes toward cruise tourism development (i.e. Brida et al., 2011; Del Chiappa & Abbate, 2016). However, studies have mostly analyzed cruising destinations in the Caribbean, Arctic and the polar areas (Hritz & Cecil 2008; Diedrich 2010; Klein 2010; Stewart et al., 2013; Heeney, 2015; Stewart et al., 2015; Jordan & Vogt, 2017) and, recently, also in the Mediterranean area (Marušić et al., 2008; Brida et al., 2012; Peručić & Puh, 2012; Pulina et al., 2013; Del Chiappa & Abbate 2016; Del Chiappa et al., 2017; Del Chiappa, et al., 2018b; Del Chiappa, et al., 2018c), mainly focusing on port-of-call cruise destinations. Despite this, only few studies have been carried out on homeport cruise destinations so far (Brida & Zapata 2010), and very few studies exist on destinations where the number of tourists creates massive overcrowding. This study was therefore carried out by surveying a quota sample of 354 individuals residing in Venice. Venice was selected as the research setting for this study for two main reasons. First, it is the second homeport in the Mediterranean area and one of the most famous tourism destinations worldwide, with around 24 million tourists a year. Second, it is considered to be affected by the so-called overtourism phenomenon (Seraphin et al., 2018). Anti-tourism movements have been growing in the last few years, voicing their concerns toward the continuous growth of the tourism phenomenon in the city, particularly toward cruise-related activities. This renders the research setting particularly interesting for the purposes of this study. Specifically, this paper aims to profile residents in Venice according to their perceptions towards the impacts of cruise tourism, and to ascertain whether there are significant differences among the clusters based on the socio-demographic traits of respondents.