Web Site Review:Editor: Dimitrios Buhalis

Internet Tourism Site Review: CruisingNorman Douglas1, Ngaire Douglas21Paci®c Pro®les, Alstonville, Australia2Southern Cross University, Lismore, Australia

As everyone involved in tourism must knowby now, cruising is the fastest growing sectorof the world's largest industry. One illustrationof this is the number of web sites devoted to it.Enter the words cruise shipping into an Internetsearch engine and up comes the cheeryinformation that the search has located1 582 350 web pages on the subject. As withmany other entries in search engines, however,investigations are protracted by the amount ofduplication and reduplication, as some sitesrepeat their information under various guises.This brief survey indicates informative sites inthree categories, cruise lines, cruise publica-tions and museums/miscellaneous.As cruising should begin with cruise ships,

two of the largest companies are mentionedhere. Every cruise company, no matter what itssize, has its own site: the larger the organisa-tion, the ¯ashier the presentation. P&O, `thecompany that invented cruising', has a num-ber of sites, as be®ts its long history and world-wide interests. Websites <www.p-and-o.com>and <www.pocruises.com> are the most valu-able, the latter containing a useful four-pagehistorical summary of the company. P&Odisplays its ®nances for the past 5 years,reviews of all the company's operationsincluding its extensive non-cruising activities,and a picture of Chairman Lord Sterling ofPlaistow, to study while you read his annual

statement. The company's professed concernfor the environment is displayed in a numberof brie®ng papers and notes on the subject.P&O's major rival in the heavyweight

cruising class is Carnival Cruises, `The mostpopular cruise line in the world', according toits main page. Carnival is the recent purchaserof Cunard, which was acquired for its `brandname', according to new Chief ExecutiveOf®cer Larry Pimentel, rather than its `eclecticmix of ships that did not quite ®t.' (CruiseIndustry News, May 1999). Carnival's site,<www.carnival.com/funonline.asp>, is extensive,offering, besides the usual company overviewand displays of the ¯eet, an interesting amountofcorporate information, includingtheextentofCarnival's interest in other brand names. Thereis a fairly generous quantity of ®nancial detailalso,with estimates of company earnings, stockmarket quotes and summaries of annual re-ports. A page of information on employmentopportunitieswiththecompanyisprovided, forthosemainly young folkwho believewhat theyread about the romance of the sea.Publications on cruising have proliferated

recently, in both hard print and virtualformat. Cruise Industry News, <www.cruiseindustrynews.com>, despite its name, isnot aimed solely at industry members, butcontains a range of articles of general interest.A selection of these may be read (and printedoff) from its site. Recent items included auseful piece on the waste disposal manage-ment policies of cruise vessels. Porthole Maga-

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF TOURISM RESEARCHInt. J. Tourism Res. 2, 301±302 (2000)

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

* Correspondence to: Norman Douglas, Director, Paci®cPro®les, Box 229, Alstonville, NSW 2477, Australia

zine, <www.porthole.com/>, has a format aimedmore directly at the travel consumer, but offersa free on-line weekly newsletter, which con-tains current information about cruise lineactivity. Potential readers need simply type intheir requested details to begin receiving italmost immediately.Users of the print publications issued by

Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA)will be disappointed to ®nd that no compar-able information appears on its web site,<www.ten.io.com/clia/index2.htm>, as CLIAwould obviously rather sell its expensivepublications than make them available on line.Indeed, the site appears to carry no mention ofthem at all. It is of variable quality, containing,for instance, utterly vapid pro®les of cruisedestinations, but quite useful pro®les of the100 vessels in its ¯eet; that is, in the ¯eets of theassociation's 23 member companies, fromAmerican Hawaii Lines to Windstar. Thereare links to the sites of all 23, including somethat are not particularly well known.The International Council of Cruise Lines

(ICCL) presents a far less commercially or-iented site, <www.iccl.org/>, which offers asomewhat different range of information. Thiswas a relatively new site when this survey wasdone and some of its pages were still underconstruction. The ICCL offers links to regula-tory and other bodies concerned with marinematters, such as the International MaritimeOrganisation. There are also links to a numberof publications on cruising, the Council's newsreleases, and notes on such topics as passengersafety and security. One of the most valuable

items is a 10-page economic study, undertakenin 1997, of the North American cruise indus-try's impact on the USA economy.Of the museum sites, New York's Ocean

Liner Museum, <www.oceanliner.org/>, is anextremely appropriate inclusion here, becauseit is a museum without an actual physicallocation, a `virtual' facility that holds exhibi-tions in a variety of real spaces as inspirationand need arise. It does, however, provide linksto dozens of other maritime museum sitesthroughout the world, so that bookmarkingthis one site will act as a convenient ®le for allthe others. Finally, a recently establishedsite,<www.maritimematters.com>, contains animpressive amount of detail on the history ofa number of USA cruise lines and on dozens ofindividual ships. Constructed by enthusiastsMartin Cox and Peter Knego, it serves asevidence that the Internet's egalitarian qualitysometimes provides other than mere frustra-tion for the researcher.The value of any of the above sites, of course,

depends entirely on the nature of your researchinterests. Whatever the claims made for it, theInternet has not yet made other traditionalsources redundant, even if student essaysoccasionally seemto imply this. For thepurposeof most inquiries, it should be regarded ascomplementary to other lines of information,not as a substitute for them. Its rather elusivenature alsomeans that anything that is likely tobe of value shouldbedownloaded immediatelyinto another ®le or intoprint, because itmaynotbe there the next time you look. (Sites lastchecked 10 June 1999.)

Copyright # 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Int. J. Tourism Res. 2, 301±302 (2000)

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