abstract

Keywords

۱٫ Introduction

۲٫ Literature review

۳٫ Methodology

۴٫ Results and discussion

۵٫ Conclusion

Declaration of competing interest

References

abstract

The cruise industry is gravely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic due to rising public health concerns. This study combines and examines health crisis management and marketing theories to address public health concerns and improve the usage of cruise services. Combining social exchange theory, customers’ perceived value theory, and trust theory, a theoretical model is proposed. Survey data (n = 376) are then collected through an online survey that is conducted on the Chinese tourism market. The finding shows that quality management, health management, social and communication strategies, and financial strategies contribute to customers’ perceived value of cruise service. In addition, perceived value directly and indirectly influences customers’ intention to use cruise service through trust in cruise company’s pandemic management capability. This study expands the current literature on cruise crisis recovery and provides recommendations for policy and strategy formulation for the cruise industry to cope with the pandemic by focusing on public health concerns and psychology.

۱٫ Introduction

In late December 2019, COVID-19 spread rapidly worldwide. People who are infected by the virus can be seriously sick or even lose their lives, especially the aged ones. Moreover, person-to-person transmission via droplets and human contact makes COVID-19 extremely hard to control [1]. Following the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which reported a large number of confirmed infected cases onboard and was quarantined in Japan in February, 25 other cruise ships reported more than 800 confirmed cases and 10 deaths in the next two months. In March 2020, the Cruise Lines International Association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States recommended that all cruise trips worldwide should be deferred to avoid more infected cases, until the health of passengers and crew members onboard could be ensured. This was a huge strike on the cruise shipping industry [2].

The restricted space and large mixture of people during cruise trips cause the initial reproduction rate of the virus onboard without countermeasures to be 4 times higher than the rate in Wuhan in early 2020, which was the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak at that time. Meanwhile, the transmission rate on cruise ships is the highest compared to any other transportation method [3]. In the COVID-19 pandemic, the cruise ship industry has been more severely affected than many other tourism and transportation industries and is unlikely to recover due to the travel restrictions and requirements onboard, such as physical distancing, which are difficult to be fulfilled [4]. In this situation, customers tend to avoid cruise service because of the health concerns on cruise ships during the journey [5]. From the short-term perspective, developing and implementing coronavirus-related health management is urgently required for resuming the cruise industry, protecting the health of passengers and crews, and attracting customers to choose cruise service again. From the long-term perspective, the health concerns onboard will have a permanent psychological impact on customers, and only a complete and effective health management system onboard can solve their long-term concerns and motivate them to choose cruise service again when traveling. Therefore, the importance of health management on cruise ships should be prioritized.