The last two decades the structure, strategies, and operational frameworks of cruise ports changed in too many respects. Infrastructure renewal and construction has been accompanied by a wave of reform in cruise ports governance. Cruise ports management has matured with sophisticated strategies involving port professionals and linked port service providers and stakeholders. Operational practices have been reformed serving the changing features of the deployed (bigger) vessels and the modern cruise product.
The reorganisations have in several cases included port ownership, with the involvement of cruise terminal operators in services provision continuing to expand. Examining the second busiest cruise region of the world, the Mediterranean and its adjoining seas, Pallis et al. (2018) recorded 155 private entries in 71 cruise facilities located in 46 Mediterranean cruise ports of 14 different countries in the period 1997-2016. These entries were performed by 66 different operators, including 16 International Cruise Terminal Operators (ICTO) which are involved in operation, or even ownership, of cruise port terminals in more than one country. The biggest of all, Global Ports, is already listed in the London Stock Exchange, and operates in 6 different countries in the Med.
These trends are at large a response to the durable growth that the cruise shipping industry has enjoyed and the interlinked changing characteristics of the demand for port services. In 2018, 28.2 million people, or 1.4 more people than in 2017, are expected to enjoy a cruise on a vessel calling at one or more cruise regions of the world (CLIA 2019). Along with the crew of modern cruise vessels they generated more than 200 million passenger movements in ports around the globe. Ten years before, the number of people that had embarked on a cruise were just 11.8 millions. The witnessed growth was based on innovative, feature-rich ships, the use of an increasing number of ports of call and turnaround ports, and convenient departures from nearby embarkation cities as fundamental tenets. The seemingly unstoppable globalisation of cruising (Pallis and Vaggelas 2018) has been accompanied by the increase of the size of the ships, the variety of onboard services, the planning and development of new cruise ports, the organisation of land-based operations and the desires of various destinations to host cruise passengers and vessels (see contributions in: Pallis et al. 2014).
The latest port study of PortEconomics members Thanos Pallis and Aimilia Papachristou, co-authored with Kleopatra Arapi, examines the forms of cruise ports governance, the structures and strategies that are applied with the aim of matching the needs of a changing cruise industry. Introducing the conceptual ‘matching framework’ approach of port governance, the authors study the configurations of cruise ports strategies and structures in the case of the second biggest market of the world, the Mediterranean and its adjoining seas. A database detailing the features observed in cruise ports in 18 different countries forms the backbone of the empirical analysis. Performing a Categorical Principal Components Analysis (CATPCA), that seeks correlations between four categories of variables (port type, port location, port structure and port strategy) and cases, enables to detect whether there are distinctive patterns of governance regimes applied in different groups of cruise ports. The results identify four models, i.e. configurations of the environment-structure-strategy-contextual environment relationship triangle, marked, inter alia, by different roles of the managing entities – active leader, investor, marketer, and passive respectively – and associated with the different role of port authorities.
The authors’ version of the study, has published in Maritime Policy and Management journal (Vol 46, issue 5, pages 630-651), can be downloaded here.
To cite this article: Athanasios A. Pallis, Kleopatra P. Arapi & Aimilia A. Papachristou (2019): Models of cruise ports governance, Maritime Policy & Management, 46(5), 630-651. DOI: 10.1080/03088839.2019.1590657
