Do cruise passengers go off the beaten track? A spatial analysis based on mobile phone data

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ABSTRACT Previous studies of cruise passenger behaviour have primarily examined the existence of an ‘environmental tourism bubble effect’ within ports of call or iconic tourist sites. In our paper, we investigate the extent to which cruise passengers go off the beaten track and out of their environmental tourism bubble, which is typically maintained by the tourism industry. We use an original mobile phone database and employ a spatial autoregressive model. We identify the main determinants of cruise passengers’ frequentation of tourist sites. Our results show that typically, cruisers remain in their bubble given the offerings of local tour operators. They rarely leave the beaten track. The existence of privileged sites suggests new perspectives for public policy and tourism managers seeking to improve and diversify the tourism offers in a given region.