| After near 50 years of development,cruise industry has become one of the most developed segments with substantial economic benefits in tourism industry.It is estimated that over 30 million passengers expected to cruise in 2019.At the same time,the global industry will earn more than 134 billion US dollars worldwide.Cruise companies have already formed their stable markets in North America,South America,Europe and Oceania and had been focusing on the Asian-Pacific region,where China has become the biggest emerging market with around 10% of global cruisers.The fact showed that the brilliant achievement has been made in the development of cruise industry in China,but the industry still has many problems to deal with.For example,limited types of itineraries is one of the biggest problem for China to maintain a sustainable cruise industry.Reasonable cruise itinerary planning will make a great contribution to the organization and resource optimization of China cruise industry.The article aims to summarize the experiences and lessons from the international cruise industry by exploring basic characteristics,network structure and regional differentiation of global cruise itineraries,and offering implications and suggestions for itinerary planning and industry upgrading in China.In the study,4979 cruise itineraries on sale all over the world are collected from www.cruisecritic.com by using website mining method.Characteristics of cruise itinerary network structure is analyzed by the content analysis and social network analysis.Regional differentiation in four typical regions,including the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean,the Mediterranean,Europe beyond the Mediterranean,Asia and the Middle East,are explored.The statistical results show that the distribution of route length concentrates on6-14 nights.The 4979 global itineraries depart from 234 ports for exotic ports of call.In terms of departing ports,in the southeast US and Caribbean,Fort Lauderdale,Miami,and Canaveral are offering 86.48% of regional departing routes.In the Mediterranean,three major ports,Rome,Barcelona and Genoa,account for 50.71% ofthe regional routes.In the Europe beyond the Mediterranean,more than 53.70%itineraries start from Amsterdam,Southampton,Hamburg and Copenhagen.Cruise routes in Asia and the Middle East mainly start from Singapore,Tokyo,Dubai,Hong Kong and Shanghai.The social network analysis is used to deeply explore the structural characteristics of cruise route network in different regions,based on statistics of average node degree,average path length,network diameter,average clustering coefficient,value of modularity and network density derived from the Gephi Software.The results reveal that,generally speaking,for each region,due to the large number of cruise ports,cruise itinerary network has low connectivity,in other words,the network density is low.The main reason is that a few ports with very high point degrees occupy the center of the network,while the vast majority of ports are located at the edge of the network,which are relatively independent from each other.In terms of the internal structure of the network,very high modularity values,ranging from 0.5to 0.7,show that the social network analysis reveal good community detection of the route network,that is,small groups are clearly classified from the whole network.Using Gephi software,different groups are marked with different colors to reveal competition and partnership relationships.With improvement of port construction and service level,scientific cruise route layout will become the key to continuously boost development of the cruise industry in the second largest cruise source market in the world.According to findings about global cruise itineraries,some implications and suggestions are provided for China to obtain a high-quality cruise industry. |
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