Cruise Travelers’ Service Perceptions: A Critical Content Analysis

Abstract

This paper examines the main elements of online reviews left by popular cruise ships’ travelers. The eight most popular cruise ships were selected. We aimed to pinpoint the service quality experiential perceptions of cruise travelers regarding their higher or lower value for money ratings. Leximancer 4.5 software was used to derive the linkage and co-occurrence between service concepts in the online narratives of 2000 guests from Cruisecritic.com. The evaluation showed 10 areas addressed by the descriptions of the cruise’s perceived quality. These are “ship,” “staff,” “food,” “entertainment,” “room,” “area,” “embarkation,” “excursion” “disembarkation,” and “port.” Furthermore, the results highlight themes like “ship,” “staff,” “food,” “entertainment,” “room,” and “area” as belonging to the high-satisfaction group (excellent/very good), while “embarkation,” “disembarkation,” “excursion,” and “port” belong to the low-satisfaction group (poor/terrible). The study offers useful insights into cruise travelers’ general perceived experience according to user-generated content, and enables the identification of the main themes associated with different satisfaction groups.

Post COVID-19: Health crisis management for the cruise industry

“…In particular, the creation of value in cruise service is due to the increase of rewards for customers from the strategies. For example, the application of quality management strategies will increase customers' hedonic and functional value by improving the physical environment (i.e., infrastructures and surroundings on cruise ships), service interaction (i.e., customers' assessment of staff service), and outcomes (i.e., utility and benefits of cruise experience) during cruise trips [ 71 ]. Moreover, the implementation of health management strategies (i.e., policies designed for the pandemic) allows customers to enjoy smooth cruise trips, helps guarantee customer health and safety, and reduces customers' concerns about getting infected post COVID-19 pandemic, which increase the functional, hedonic, and social value of cruise service.…”

“…Quality management strategies are defined as service strategies that cruise operators implement onboard to help improve customer experience during cruise trips, which include three dimensions concerning the physical environment, interactions, and outcome [ 32 ]. Physical environment refers to the facilities and surroundings onboard; meanwhile, interactions examine staff service during cruise trips based on customer experience, and outcome relates to the benefits customers received from cruise trips.…”

“…The quality management strategies can be developed by influencing the physical environment, customer interactions, and performance outcome [ 32 ]. The physical environment refers to the physical infrastructure and surroundings on the cruise ships, which plays an important role in customers' emotional feelings during the journey.…”

Managing natural tourism attractions based on visitor reviews: a case study of Golden Beach, Karpaz

“…This method is consistent with some extant research such as a study of guest experiences at World Heritage sites ( n = 226) (Zhang and Cole, 2016) and a study of romance-based tourism in Australia (Pearce and Wu, 2016). The data was then transferred to an Excel sheet (Arasli et al , 2020a, b) where each username is represented by a pseudonym followed by the rating of the review, and the review content. The review ratings reflect a scale from 1 to 5, with 1 being rated poor and 5 being rated as excellent.…”

“…Here, some words make up keywords that distinguish one concept from another. The next phase is thesaurus derivation which relates to each seed (Arasli et al , 2020a, b). Using Leximancer analysis, it is possible to examine the relationships between words, concepts and themes in order to generate a concept map.…”