Sail through the sustainability: a longitudinal analysis of sustainability reports in the cruise industry

Cruises represent a big field in tourism. According to Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) statistics 22 million of passengers were carried worldwide during 2014, with a growth of 23% between 2009 and 2014 and there are 289 operating ships with a total passenger capacity of 485.000. Despite the economic importance of the cruise industry, low is the number of scholars who investigated the environmental impact of these companies. The cruise industry, as Butt (2007) noted, cannot be defined as a sustainable typology of tourism. The main purpose of this paper is to investigate how the negative externalities of an event reported widely in the media, such as the the industrial disaster of the Costa Concordia, have affected sustainability communication, for not only the holding company Carnival but also its most direct competitor. Authors compared the sustainability reports of Carnival Corporation & PCL and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., the major companies (in terms of market share) in the cruise sector, for a five-year period using text mining techniques, to understand how the industrial disaster of Costa Concordia modified the sustainability reports of these companies.