Caribbean Cruise Tourism: Power Relations Among Stakeholders

This research addresses two main issues; the first is the anomaly that the Caribbean accounts for over fifty percent of the world’s market share of cruise ship passenger deployment but generates less than five percent of the industry’s revenue while imposing significant financial and environmental costs on a number of Caribbean nations. The central finding is that the Caribbean cruise industry operates almost entirely for the benefit of the cruise lines. The industry is vertically integrated and has a high level of value-capture among the stakeholder chain.