[jillesvangurp]

Exactly. In terms of CO2 emissions, you're better off flying to a tropical destination and booking a hotel. The cruise ship will burn much more fuel than the jet per passenger in just a couple of days. If you stay on the thing for a month, it's going to be an order of magnitude more. There's nothing green or clean about these things.

They also have a huge ecological impact on the destinations they go to; some of which may have fragile coral reefs or other marine life that doesn't respond to well to the presence of waste dumping cruise ships. The Venetian lagoon is now off limits for cruise ships. But that's because it has sustained a lot of damage over the years. A lot of other destinations are still being actively destroyed by cruise ship tourism.

[gonzobonzo]

The estimates I'm seeing is that cruise ships are about 2x-3x the emissions per kilometer than flying to a destination and staying there (obviously, it varies with a lot of factors). So if you were flying to a nearby island, you would have fewer CO2 emissions. But something like a trip to Thailand could end up having more CO2 emissions than a cruise.

It is kind of strange, though, that I always hear about the carbon foot print when cruises get brought up, but I almost never hear about it when vacationing in general is brought up. It seems like if people were really concerned, they'd be telling people to go to local beaches and not beaches on the other side of the planet, but I've never seen people say "Don't go to Malaysia! If you go to Cancun you'll be creating much lower CO2 emissions."

I get the feeling that cruise ships in particular are targeted because, unlike trips to Southeast Asia, going on a cruise ship is considered "uncool."

[zamadatix]

Plenty of folks say "try not to fly" in general (was it France that banned short haul flights for trains recently?) but "don't take that long haul to where you've dreamed of your whole life" is a significantly less practical pitch than "well if you want to see the Caribbean spend more time there by taking a more eco-friendly flight rather riding on a cruise ship".

[gonzobonzo]

> but "don't take that long haul to where you've dreamed of your whole life" is a significantly less practical pitch than "well if you want to see the Caribbean spend more time there by taking a more eco-friendly flight rather riding on a cruise ship".

This framing is already putting a pretty strong bias into it. Your preferred vacation is something "you've dreamed of your whole life," while their preferred vacations is simply how they prefer to "ride" to a location.

One could also say that "don't take that cruise you always dreamed of your whole life" is a significantly less practical pitch than "well if you want to go to a beach, go to a beach closer to your house."

Both of that statement and yours treat something that most people consider extremely important (being on a cruise, having the beach they go to be in South East Asia) as being merely incidental to the vacation itself.

[zamadatix]

I'd agree there is bias but argue the framing is highlighting, not introducing, it. E.g. how many wanting to take a cruise are just as happy with Norfolk, Baltimore, and Wilmington as stops vs San Juan, St. Thomas, and St Martin? I'm sure someone out there is but they are certainly going to be the minority. In a cruise where you are going is still a central part of the vacation and you can keep a large part of that even if you remove the ship. In your alternative you're throwing out the entire trip with the bathwater - one is a compromise, the other a full sacrifice. No matter how you want to slice that it's a much more grating pitch for the average tourist.

[gonzobonzo]

> I'd agree there is bias but argue the framing is highlighting, not introducing, it. E.g. how many wanting to take a cruise are just as happy with Norfolk, Baltimore, and Wilmington as stops vs San Juan, St. Thomas, and St Martin?

That's like arguing that if someone wants to go to Phuket instead of an industrial town in Thailand, then going to Thailand isn't that important to them and they should just go to Cancun. You can't really say "unless you're happy with _any_ vacation that has X, you don't care that much about X." For almost everyone, a vacation relies on several different elements coming together.

[zamadatix]

The point was "most people dream of cruises to interesting places, not cruises themselves" and your response was "people don't want to take vacations to boring places either"? Nobody is actually going to go to boring places in these examples, they'll almost always pick the most interesting destinations because that's the most important part and the cruise ships or other things are the smaller parts. The flight is intentionally irrelevant to itself in vacations - it's the fastest (and less CO2 heavy than cruise) way to get to the important part. If the cruise were the more important part of the vacation then destination wouldn't matter was all the example was about so applying it to the destination doesn't make sense (the destination can't have a different importance than the destination).

That doesn't mean the utility of a cruise is 0, it means the utility of the cruise is less than the utility of the destination for the vacation -> an easier pitch to change the cruise rather than the destination. Say your goal is to convince someone to reduce emission for their vacation, how would you intuitively rank these in terms of "easiest pitch" to "hardest pitch" and why?

A: "I know you've always want to go to St. Martin but you should look into flying rather than a cruise because..."

B: "I know you've always wanted to go to St. Martin but you should look into <some closer beach they can drive or fly to> because..."

C: "I know you've always wanted to go to Asia but you should look into a flight to Cancun because..."

To me it I'd go the easiest is A (they still go where they want to go), then B (they still go somewhere interesting), then C (they go to the least interesting place). The latter 2 both pretty hard sells though. I'm curious if you rank B and C as easier pitches? If so that could possibly be part of the answer to your original question about why you expect people to talk about flights more than you hear? I.e. I'm not saying you must agree just that perhaps there is a difference of opinion vs most people driving that split.

[mschuster91]

> The Venetian lagoon is now off limits for cruise ships. But that's because it has sustained a lot of damage over the years.

The problem with Venice is more that the cruise ships bring in large amounts of "day tourists" - they come in in the morning, eat some overpriced pizza and pasta, buy overpriced Chinese-made "authentic" souvenirs, and leave in the evening, not contributing much to the local economy.

[omnimus]

How is that not contributing much to the local economy?

[mschuster91]

Because the income is spread to a very few people - those lucky enough to own a pizza or coffee store along popular tourist routes. Everyone else doesn't profit at all from the tourists or makes only pittances.

That is not enough to sustain a healthy city, which led to most of Venice being left for grabs for AirBnBs - good luck finding regular Venetians actually living in their city.

[carlosjobim]

Responsible tourists not only buy food and souvenirs and tours, they also hire carpenters and assistant key account managers, as well as purchase sheet metal, plastic pylons and diesel engines to support local jobs.

[omnimus]

Saying that only very few people profit from the tourists is like saying only very few people profit from the factory behind the city. You are totally right that only few people profit but this is the case with everything unfortunately.

[etrautmann]

Hasn’t the entire city of Venice been anlmost exclusively funded by and setup for tourism for hundreds of years?

[Cheer2171]

Day tourism is far less beneficial to locals than overnight tourism.

[omnimus]

Not hundreds but it is for sure right now. It has been for decades.

[Thorrez]

I don't see how "day tourists" are different from other types of tourists.

[mschuster91]

Other types of tourists spend much more time in the city, they sleep in hotels, they also visit more than just the Piazza San Marco (and thus, distribute traffic flow much more evenly).

[jillesvangurp]

Which is why they started charging money to enter the city.

[Cthulhu_]

Everything you mentioned is a contribution to the local economy, though?

Tourism is €215 billion of Italy's income, about 1/10th of its GDP. Rich tourists coming off cruise ships doing impulse buys at huge profit margins sounds like a good thing to me, from a purely capitalist perspective.

[m000]

It is the "local economy" only if you believe in trickle-down economics.

The area of visited by cruise ship tourists is typically a very small fraction of the port city. Worse, the establishments in that area only account for a small fraction of the overall local employment, and are owned by a handful of families or (worse) funds/corporations.

So money does flow, but not really to the local economy, apart from a number of low-paid service jobs.

You also appear to have a very outdated view of cruise ship tourism. What "rich tourists"? These days it is the less well-off that go on cruises, even choosing to cruise through their retirement as the cheaper option [1]. Nobody is going to make expensive purchases as they have already visited half a dozen ports before their current stop and have another half a dozen to go.

[1] https://globalnews.ca/news/10004079/retired-couple-51-consec...

[Ekaros]

Problem is that it doesn't actually work that way. The boat tourist don't spend too much, or comparatively spend lot less than those that visit cities in other ways. The infra to support the ships cost money, and then usually any activities are run by ship owners. Plus full board is standard so many prefer to eat there and also sleep.

It is much more efficient to focus on tourists that live in hotels, buy every meal from local restaurants or at least shops. Have actual time to spend in more than main attractions as such diffuse over larger area. And well have more time for shopping or do it at local airport.

[newaccount74]

Wait until they hear about people travelling in camper vans that cook their own meals and just park by the roadside for sleeping! Or even worse, bicycle tourists who bivouac by the river, they don't even buy gas!

[leoedin]

Camper vans are already a big problem for some rural areas. And they don’t tend to contribute much to the local economy. You phrased it like that was a gotcha, but it’s not really. Camper-vans and cruises are both high-impact low benefit forms of tourism.

I wouldn’t put bike tourists in that group - because they are incredibly low impact in comparison, and in my experience most bike tourists are spending money as they go - either on accommodation or food.

[nkrisc]

How many camper cans and bike tourists descend on Venice every day?

Sure, camper and bike tourists probably don’t contribute much to local economies, but they also have negligible negative impacts, so what’s your point?

[amelius]

Also, cruise ships must be extremely boring to be on. You're basically held captive inside a floating shopping mall for weeks.

I wonder how many people book a second trip.

[qm2crossing]

Surprisingly a ton of people.

I just got off a QM2 transatlantic crossing(which is about as captive/boring as cruises can get?) Friday. I went on a lark, I have never “cruised”(and had a pretty negative view of it - all people do is eat and drink etc)but had an itch to cross the ocean on a ship in old timey titanic type way. I’m also ~30(which might as well be 16 on a cunard ship - very very old crowd) and went alone. I expected this was mostly a bucket list type thing people did once, or a select coterie of people who both need to travel and cannot fly.

My most surprising takeaway was that almost everyone had done it before, a lot of people many many times. It was legitimately rare to meet a first timer, even among the relatively young group I fell into.

The boring bit is more subjective, it was more fun than I expected. I can see why people love it. “enforced” relaxation, no stops, peaceful, easy, etc.

[hildolfr]

So someone pitches you a floating city complete with amusement park, hotel, entertainment venues and restaurants that trots around the world dropping you off at nearly everything interesting on the way, and you think it sounds boring?

I don't like cruise ships for reasons, but they never struck me as 'boring '.

[WorldMaker]

Also a spa, and a casino, usually.

They are a floating mini-Vegas hotel. A lot of the same reasons people find Las Vegas fun are the same for a cruise ship, if maybe just in "miniature" (though the scale factor is now questionable on some of the huge ships), just that when you get the chance to leave the hotel you aren't stepping into Nevada desert, you've got an island beach or a cool port town to explore, and a variety of them at that.

[baggy_trough]

Depends on the trip but it's more like a hotel that shows up in a different city every day, so there's something new all the time if you get off the boat.

[Cerium]

My perspective as well. When I was high school and college I went on a few cruises with my elderly grandparents. We had a blast. Every morning you wake up in a new city without the bother of packing bags or spending any time actually going there. Unlike airports, piers are frequently in the oldest most interesting part of the city and you can directly walk to see quite a bit.

[mmooss]

Isn't that going a little far in applying your subjective preferences to universal fact? Lots of people love cruise ships - they seem to be a pretty good business, in fact.