Positioning Cruise Vacation

In recent years the cruise business has become more and more important in the tourism industry and the number of consumers choosing this type of holidays has increased considerably. A cruise holiday consists in the design, planning and creation of services on a ship that sails between ports, so as to be able to support the life on board, like to the life in a hotel or in a village, with halts and trips to visit different countries of the itinerary. The core services a cruise holiday provides transportation and accommodation, but other components that characterize the product, such as catering, transport from/to the port, trips, itineraries and on board entertainment activities, may turn out to be key factors in customer choice and satisfaction. In other words, today, the cruise is not just a transport service taking people from one place to another, like it was up until a few years ago. Instead it is a service package capable of competing with all the more traditional offers in the tourism sector. This work seeks to examine the question of cruise vacation positioning because, as opposed to other kinds of offer, there has proven to be a considerable cognitive gap between those who have experienced a cruise vacation, at least once, and the rest of the potential market. An awareness of this difference in perceptions could be extremely useful to the enterprises operating in the cruise’s field and help them create specific communication and promotion policies.