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Then ships docked for days at a time; in Hawaii they were met by young boys swimming
alongside the hull, waiting to catch coins tossed overboard by passengers. There were days
to stroll along the beach, swim in the surf, visit memorials and forests before the ship
turned around to return home. Tourists cruising to Alaska in the early 1950s spent two
days in Ketchikan, three days in Juneau and five days in Seward. In those days a cruise was
truly a rare, once-in-a-lifetime occasion and passengers expected to spend far more time
on land, exploring.
Today's cruise excursions are miserly in comparison. What do passengers actually
see, understand and appreciate after a few hours whizzing past masterpiece paintings or
strolling through an old European capitol with a guide reciting details of an unfamiliar
history that will be forgotten by the next morning.
The advantage of these excursions, said Adam Goldstein of Royal Caribbean, was that
cruise ships allow tourists to visit so many cities in such a short time, albeit for mostly half-
day stops.
“On a cruise ship you can see Tallinn, Estonia, and two days and a night in St. Peters-
burg, and you can see Helsinki and Oslo,” he said, describing a seven- or twelve-day cruise.
“It's really not feasible to do that many flights in a two-week period.”
This is true and many tourists find a day in Tallinn and another in Oslo more than
enough. However, the people of Tallinn and Oslo are having second thoughts about see-
ing hordes of people descending on their cities at once. Thousands of cruise passengers
herded into a few well-known waterfronts or museums do earn bragging rights about see-
ing the windmills of Mykonos or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The regular appearance
of these crowds are transforming the cities and ports, helping push out locals and alter the
culture and sense of place that drew tourists in the first place.
“Cruise ships have changed the face of tourism in the last ten years, and not for the bet-
ter,” said Paul Bennett, founder and head of Context Travel in Philadelphia. “They're like
portable low-rent Hiltons that go everywhere with little concern for the garbage they leave
behind or the havoc they make in the short time they invade a place. See Rome—the Vat-
ican and the Coliseum—in a few hours and then take a bus back to the ship. We call it
'drive-by tourism.' ”
Venetians call it a crisis. And Venice isn't the only port where the locals feel cruise ships
have gotten out of hand. The town of Bar Harbor, Maine, decided in 2009 to restrict the
number of cruise passengers allowed in a day. A few years earlier Key West, Florida, did
the same thing. And the people of Moloka'i, Hawaii, effectively banned all cruise ships
from calling on their port.
This antipathy derives not only from the frustration of seeing your city overrun on a
regular basis but also knowing that there is little profit in welcoming them. In Venice the
city spends more to cover the services used by the ships—water, electricity, cleaning—and
their passengers than it receives in the taxes paid per passenger to the port. (Given Italy's
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