CRUISING: DESTINATION NOWHERE - Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism - page 110

Both Sweeting and his boss, Adam Goldstein, said the best destinations are the tourism
villages that Royal Caribbean creates itself, where passengers swim, eat and play in an ar-
tificial environment not knowing if they are in Haiti or another Caribbean nation. Also
appreciated are tourism villages near a better-known area like Montego Bay in Jamaica,
where passengers can bus in and out of the real country from their base camp.
Places like Cozumel become tourism villages once they open up to mass tourism from
cruise ships. Ports, cities, beaches, promenades are now seen as “destinations” and rated as
enjoyable if passengers can spend five hours and feel they have had a memorable “exper-
ience” captured in photos and remembered with souvenirs. The goal for the cruise lines
is to shuttle tourists in and out with the help of local charter buses and tour agencies with
the greatest efficiency and assured profits. For instance, our cruise offered us fifty-seven
options for excursions to Cozumel, averaging from $50 to $150 per person, and all payable
to the cruise ship. Local businesses on the list pay a percentage of their fee to the cruise
ship—often as much as 50 percent. Moreover, as in Venice, citizen groups question what
happens to the fees cruise ships pay political leaders for permission to dock.
“No Caribbean country has survived intact from the cruise ships. I think that is the
worst thing they do, flooding the ports and beaches with crowds of people,” said Jonath-
an Tourtellot, director of the National Geographic 's Center for Sustainable Destinations.
“You should see what they do to the old square in Dubrovnik.”
To Adam Goldstein of Royal Caribbean, these complaints sound like snobbery.
“There is a wish, a nostalgic kind of wish in certain quarters for the days when relatively
few people had the wherewithal to go and see places like Dubrovnik for one. It was small
numbers of people staying in small hospitality establishments with zero congestion, no
crowds, not many people there. Which would have been a really, really nice experience
for those few people who had access to that opportunity,” he said.
“But in the world where many, many, many millions of people, tens of millions of
people, maybe hundreds of millions of people in number, when you bring China and oth-
er countries into the mix, really want to explore the world—the idea that you can keep a
few places to a few people wandering through the streets with a tour guide is not realistic.”
That means ports will have to figure out how to manage the congestion from thousands
of cruise passengers arriving in a single day, said Mr. Goldstein. “Our goal is to bring
volumes of people in an environmentally responsible way where congestion is manage-
able. There is no interest on our part to have unmanageable congestions.”
Manageable congestion to one man is a nightmare to another. Mr. Tourtellot disagreed
with cruise companies taking credit for allowing millions of people to explore the world.
“They barely have time to get off the ship, go to a museum or a beach, before they're back
on board speaking English to the waiter at their assigned dining table,” he said.
The fundamental issue, though, is the cruise company's claim that protests against
crowds that are ruining a spot is somehow “elitist.” Mr. Tourtellot has toured the beaches