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Is the future of cruising threatened by overtourism? Navigating the industry’s troubled waters

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Many cruise lines have pledged to have net zero emissions by 2050.

Since travel resumed post-pandemic, cruising has made a swift comeback.

This resurgence has rekindled the debate over its environmental impact and strain on popular destinations.

In 2023, cruise travel surpassed 2019 pre-pandemic levels recording 31.7 million passengers, according to the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) 2024 State of the Industry Report.

With 84 per cent of baby boomers and Gen Xers and 81 per cent of millennials planning to return to sea, cruises remain a dominant and enduring travel choice.

However, industry leaders still need to work to address passengers’ sustainability concerns.

Cruise ships banned from dozens of overwhelmed destinations

The cruise industry travels to every part of the world, including Antarctica.

However, some ports have responded to cruise guests by implementing tourist fees, limiting the number of ships in port, or prohibiting ships from docking altogether.

Venice banned cruise ships from docking at its port. Many cruise lines still offer ‘Venice’ itineraries, but they now dock in nearby cities, such as Trieste or Ravenna, and bus passengers into the city.

The Alaskan capital Juneau faces overwhelming cruise traffic during its short season. Welcoming 1.6 million visitors annually, the city plans to limit daily cruise passengers in 2026.

Santorini in Greece sees more cruise visitors than its population can handle, prompting local authorities to limit the number of ships allowed to dock daily.

On this popular Greek island, cruise passengers frequently encounter tension from locals, even with just one ship in port.

Cruise passengers are increasingly suffering the wrath of locals fed up with overtourism, as residents greet ships with protests and chants. In extreme cases like in Barcelona, citizens are spraying water on tourists, forcing them to leave the city’s main attractions.

Recently, locals in Amsterdam protested and prevented Royal Caribbean’s nine-month world cruise ship from docking by blocking locks that the boat needed to use to enter the port.

Cruising damages waterways and threatens ecosystems

As well as contributing to overtourism, those opposing cruise travel say that the industry destroys the planet with high emissions, and damages waterways and reef systems.

They worry that with more and bigger ships environmental damages will increase.

“I would not go on a cruise for several reasons,” says Emese Maczko, owner of Eco Lodges Everywhere. “These megaships have a huge environmental footprint and are overwhelming small destinations.”

Staggered arrivals and private islands: How cruises are becoming more sustainable

One way cruise lines can make their type of tourism more sustainable is by staggering their arrivals into frequently overcrowded ports.

Itineraries can limit the quantity of ships in a single port by scheduling arrivals on different days or spending less time in port.

In Mykonos, for example, ships stagger arrival times, with one docking in the early morning and another in the afternoon.

This strategy reduces overcrowding while still allowing cruise passengers to experience popular destinations.

Some cruise lines purchase islands and incorporate those stops into their most popular itineraries.

It’s planned that  10 cruise line-owned destinations and five new private islands or beach clubs will open in the next two years.

Some of the most popular private island experiences are in the Bahamas, where cruisers enjoy crystal-clear water and powdery white sand.

Disney now owns two private stops: Castaway Cay and Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point.

Carnival Corporation has Half Moon Cay and Princess Cay, and plans to open Celebration Key in July 2025.

Royal Caribbean offers its popular private island, Perfect Day at Coco Cay, on most Bahamas itineraries. It’s a favourite stop for cruisers – and some passengers select their itineraries specifically so they can visit it.

Virgin Voyages, the adults-only cruise line owned by Richard Branson, doesn’t have an entire island but instead offers a beach club option in Bimini, a chain of Bahamian islands east of Miami.

How cruise ships are becoming less environmentally damaging

CLIA highlights the goal of many cruise lines to have net zero emissions by 2050.

To achieve this, cruise lines have invested in technological advancements aimed at reducing their environmental footprint.

Around 32 pilot projects and collaborative initiatives are underway with fuel producers and engine companies testing sustainable fuels and technologies.

In its 2023 report, CLIA outlines several key initiatives to make cruise travel a sustainable form of tourism for years to come.

With Advanced Wastewater Treatment Systems (AWTS), CLIA cruise lines pledge not to discharge untreated sewage during regular operations.

These high-tech AWTS systems often surpass standards set for coastal cities and international regulations.

Some cruise lines also use advanced infrastructure to produce up to 90 per cent of their water on board, reducing the need to take water from areas with limited resources.

To reduce the impact on marine life, CLIA members are expected to slow down in sensitive areas and use technology to reduce underwater noise and vibrations.

Some ships also host scientists to support marine life research.

Certain ships repurpose all waste, use excess heat from machinery for water heating, and reduce food waste with bio-digesters.

In terms of greener fuels, ships with flexible propulsion systems will have the potential to adapt to bioLNG, synthetic LNG or methanol when these become more readily available.

Author

  • Daniela Daecher is a twenty-something bookworm and coffee addict with a passion for geeking out over sci fi, tv, movies, and books. In 2013 she completed her BA in English with a specialization in Linguistics. In 2014 she completed her MA in Linguistics, focusing on the relationship between language and communication in written form. She currently lives in Munich, Germany.

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A 4-year cruise or a €1 house in Italy: Inside the schemes helping Americans skip Trump’s presidency

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Searches by Americans for moving abroad soared in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.

Following the recent US election result, Google searches for ‘how to move to Europe’ increased by more than 1,000 per cent in some countries.

Searches by Americans for moving to Canada and Australia soared by 1,270 and 820 per cent respectively in the 24 hours after the first polls closed, according to Google data.

The interest in leaving the States has not gone unnoticed by marketing firms.

A residential cruise ship is now offering Americans a four-year ‘escape’ trip while a Sardinian village has relaunched its €1 house scheme.

Cruise company offers four-year escape from Trump

Cruise firm Villa Vie Residences is marketing a four-year round the world trip to Americans looking to skip Donald Trump’s second term as president.

The Tour La Vie programme offers passengers a stay of up to four years onboard while visiting 140 countries – which doesn’t include the US.

The irreverently named packages include a one-year ‘Escape from Reality’ cruise, a two-year ‘Mid-Term Selection’ option, a three-year ‘Everywhere but Home’ cruise, and the four-year ‘Skip Forward’ trip.

Guests would join the Villa Vie Odyssey, a residential cruise ship which set sail from Belfast in September, several months into its voyage.

“We came up with this marketing campaign before we even knew who would win. Regardless of who would have won, you would have half of the population upset,” CEO Mikael Petterson told US news site Newsweek.

“Quite frankly, we don’t have a political view one way or the other. We just wanted to give people who feel threatened to have a way to get out.”

Prices start at a little under $40,000 (€38,000) a year. For those opting for the full four-year escape, single-occupancy cabins start at $256,000 (€243,000) while double-occupancy costs up to $320,000 (€303,000).

The price includes all food and drinks (alcohol only at dinner), WiFi, medical visits, weekly housekeeping service and bi-weekly laundry.

Sardinian village relaunches €1 house scheme for Americans

In rural Sardinia, the village of Ollolai has revived its €1 house scheme, now targeting Americans exhausted by the election.

The homes-for-the-price-of-an-espresso offer has been relaunched for US citizens “worned [sic] out by global politics” and “looking to embrace a more balanced lifestyle”, local authorities write on the village’s website.

“Of course, we can’t specifically mention the name of one US president who just got elected, but we all know that he’s the one from whom many Americans want to get away from now and leave the country,” village mayor Francesco Columbo told US news site CNN.

“We have specifically created this website now to meet US post-elections relocation needs.”

Those needs include slowing down and recharging with Ollolai’s dreamy Mediterranean lifestyle.

“Nestled in pristine nature, surrounded by incredible cuisine, and immersed in a community with ancient traditions in the rare Earth’s Blue Zone, Ollolai is the perfect destination to reconnect, recharge and embrace a new way of life,” the website claims.

Available properties will soon be listed online with prices ranging from €1 for houses needing substantial renovations to €100,000 for those that are ready to live in.

This is not the first time the village in Sardinia has put houses for a pittance on the market. In a bid to halt a steep population decline, Ollolai began selling off abandoned homes in 2018 to people willing to carry out $25,000 (€24,000) of renovations within a three-year timespan.

Author

  • Daniela Daecher is a twenty-something bookworm and coffee addict with a passion for geeking out over sci fi, tv, movies, and books. In 2013 she completed her BA in English with a specialization in Linguistics. In 2014 she completed her MA in Linguistics, focusing on the relationship between language and communication in written form. She currently lives in Munich, Germany.

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Catalonia’s holiday rental ban may not be allowed under EU law as Airbnb pushes back

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Catalonia has said they want to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 holiday lets in the next 5 years.

Catalonia’s recent ban on Airbnb-style holiday rentals breaches EU law, according to a complaint filed with the European Commission by an industry group.

The European Holiday Home Association claims that the ban, introduced by Catalonia in June this year, breaches the provision of services directive.

The Spanish region announced that they wanted to rid Barcelona of its 10,000 tourist flat licences over the next five years. The city has not granted new licences since 2014 but this has not helped to stem a housing crisis, with locals saying they can not find places to live at affordable prices.

Why has Barcelona’s Airbnb ban been challenged?

“We are convinced that EU law has not been respected,” Viktorija Molnar, Secretary General of the European Holiday Home Association (EHHA), said in a statement released on Wednesday.

“By submitting the EU complaint, we hope that the European Commission will take a step further and open a formal infringement procedure against Spain,” added Molnar, whose group represents short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Expedia’s Vrbo.

The move follows legal concerns raised by the European Commission itself that restrictions brought in by the Spanish region were disproportionate to the aim of tackling housing shortages.

EHHA argues that “unjustified, disproportionate and unsuitable” restrictions breach the EU’s Services Directive, which regulates a swathe of activities from hotels to legal advice. They also said that claims about the impact of Airbnb on housing affordability are “politically inflamed”.

The lobby group may have support from the European Commission itself, whose officials wrote to Spanish authorities to protest the law in February according to a document seen by Euronews Travel.

“The Commission services consider that the restrictions laid down in [Catalonia’s] Decree-law 3/2023 are not suitable to attain the objective of fighting housing shortage and are disproportionate to that objective,” the document said.

Spanish authorities could have also considered less swingeing restrictions and hadn’t offered evidence that short-term rentals were responsible for housing market tensions, it added – noting that there were three times as many empty dwellings as tourist rental properties in Catalonia.

Barcelona is just one European holiday destinations trying to find ways to tackle overtourism.

Cities like Venice have banned cruise ships from stopping on their shores, Athens regularly restricts visitor numbers at the famous Acropolis and Amsterdam is moving its red light district out of the city centre to try and clean up its image.

How the European Commission is taking on holiday rentals

Brussels has already taken action to bring the sharing economy within the regulatory fold, offering new rights to platform workers and hiking value-added tax on short-term lets and ridesharing apps such as Uber.

But the issue could prove totemic for Commission President Ursula von der Leyen – who has created the first-ever European Commissioner for Housing as part of her second mandate, set to take office within weeks.

She has told Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen to “tackle systemic issues with short-term accommodation rentals”, in a mission letter that handed him the housing brief alongside responsibility for energy policy.

A spokesperson for the Catalan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

CORRECTION(20 November, 10:02): corrects spelling of Molnar’s name

Author

  • Daniela Daecher is a twenty-something bookworm and coffee addict with a passion for geeking out over sci fi, tv, movies, and books. In 2013 she completed her BA in English with a specialization in Linguistics. In 2014 she completed her MA in Linguistics, focusing on the relationship between language and communication in written form. She currently lives in Munich, Germany.

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Microsoft pitches AI agents that can perform tasks on their own at annual Ignite event

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The move has been criticised by other tech companies who have branded Microsoft as being a “panic mode”.

In opening remarks to a company conference in the United States on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has set the stage for where the company is taking its artificial intelligence (AI) business.

AI developers are increasingly pitching the next wave of generative AI (GenAI) chatbots as AI “agents” that can do more useful things on people’s behalf.

But the cost of building and running AI tools is so high that more investors are questioning whether the technology’s promise is overblown.

Microsoft said last month that it’s preparing for a world where “every organisation will have a constellation of agents – ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous”.

Microsoft elaborated in a blog post Tuesday that such autonomous agents “can operate around the clock to review and approve customer returns or go over shipping invoices to help businesses avoid costly supply-chain errors”.

Microsoft’s annual Ignite conference caters to its big business customers.

Microsoft criticised

The pivot toward so-called “agentic AI” comes as some users are seeing limits to the large language models behind chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Microsoft’s own Copilot.

Those systems work by predicting the most plausible next word in a sentence and are good at certain writing-based work tasks.

But tech companies have been working to build AI tools that are better at longer-range planning and reasoning so they can access the web or control computers and perform tasks on their own on a user’s behalf.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticized Microsoft’s pivot. Salesforce also has its “Agentforce” service that uses AI in sales, marketing, and other tasks.

“Microsoft rebranding Copilot as ‘agents’? That’s panic mode,” Benioff said in a social media post last month. He went on to claim that Microsoft’s flagship AI assistant, called Copilot, is “a flop” that is inaccurate and spills corporate data.

Author

  • Daniela Daecher is a twenty-something bookworm and coffee addict with a passion for geeking out over sci fi, tv, movies, and books. In 2013 she completed her BA in English with a specialization in Linguistics. In 2014 she completed her MA in Linguistics, focusing on the relationship between language and communication in written form. She currently lives in Munich, Germany.

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