Whether and How Travelers Prefer to Utilize Cruises When They Re-Open after COVID-19 Closures

The Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has become one of the most impactful pandemics in modern history. While COVID-19 has adversely affected almost every industry in the U.S. since early 2020, cruise tourism remains one of the most impacted businesses in transportation. By the second half of 2020, the economy was timidly reopening, and society was debating on whether and how to implement policies to enforce mask-wearing and social distancing to re-start safe economic activities. The need of the hour for the cruise industry was to understand the current situation, consider strategies to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, and adjust to the “new normal”. This paper provides a unique historical record that shows the preferences of people to choose cruise trips while immersed in the COVID-19 pandemic context that characterized the second half of 2020. A stated preference (SP) experiment is designed to collect data from diverse U.S. respondents on their preferences for cruise selections in COVID-19 times and the dataset is analyzed using a multinomial logit model with random parameters (MNL-RP). Variables related to price, trip-specific mask-wearing or social-distancing mandates, cruise rating, on-board experience, cruise category, cruise itinerary, destination characteristics, trip length, age of the traveler, employment type, previous cruising experience, household income and children are found to significantly affect cruise selections in this critical time. Cruise companies can use these results to better understand the desirability and potential demand for cruise trips in the context of the study.