The Cruise Industry and Its Geography

The modern cruise industry is highly concentrated corporately: three publicly traded groups, Carnival Corporation & plc, Royal Caribbean Group, and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, together control the large majority of global ocean-cruise passenger capacity, according to figures regularly published by the industry trade association Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), with Carnival Corporation alone operating brands including Carnival Cruise Line, Princess Cruises, Holland America Line, and Costa Cruises under a single corporate parent formed through a 2003 merger. CLIA's annual State of the Cruise Industry reports place global cruise passenger volume at roughly 30 million a year in the period just before the pandemic, a figure that collapsed to near zero during 2020 as the industry became a highly visible focus of COVID-19 outbreak concern, most notably aboard the Diamond Princess, quarantined off Yokohama, Japan in February 2020, before recovering to record volumes by the mid-2020s.