Analyzing seasonality in cruise tourism: The seaports in Turkey

Abstract

Seasonality is a characteristic problem of tourism and has a negative impact on the cruise industry. Therefore, analyzing seasonality in cruise traffic is critically important. This paper examines the seasonal fluctuations in the cruise calls and passenger movements in the seaports in Turkey during 2019-2021, by using some measures, such as the seasonal index, cluster analysis, the seasonality indicator, the Gini coefficient, the Lorenz curve, and the coefficient of variation. The findings show that the cruise traffic in the sample seaports was significantly seasonal in the given period. It is also shown that the novel coronavirus disease has aggravated seasonality which is manifest from 2020 onwards. Moreover, occupancy rates in these seaports were substantially poor. The global pandemic had a significant negative effect on port capacity utilization. Strategies for coping with seasonality in the given seaports should be created by considering the Eastern Mediterranean cruise traffic and its characteristics.

Keywords

• Seasonality
• Cruise Traffic
• Cruise Tourism
• Seaports
• Turkey

Kruvaziyer turizminde mevsimsellik analizi: Türkiye'deki limanlar

Abstract

Mevsimsellik, turizmin karakteristik bir sorunudur ve kruvaziyer endüstrisi üzerinde olumsuz bir etkiye sahiptir. Bu nedenle, kruvaziyer trafiğinde mevsimselliğin analizi kritik öneme sahiptir. Bu çalışma, 2019-2021 yılları arasında Türkiye'de bulunan limanlardaki gemi seferleri ve yolcu hareketlerindeki mevsimsel dalgalanmaları mevsimsel indeks, küme analizi, mevsimsellik göstergesi, Gini katsayısı, Lorenz eğrisi ve varyasyon katsayısı metotlarıyla analiz etmektedir. Bulgular, örnek limanlardaki kruvaziyer trafiğinin söz konusu dönemde önemli ölçüde mevsimsel olduğunu göstermektedir. Ayrıca, yeni koronavirüs hastalığının 2020'den itibaren mevsimselliği ağırlaştırdığı da gösterilmiştir. Bu limanlardaki doluluk oranlarının oldukça düşük olduğu belirlenmiştir. Küresel salgının liman kapasite kullanımı üzerinde önemli bir olumsuz etkisi olmuştur. Doğu Akdeniz kruvaziyer trafiği ve özellikleri dikkate alınarak söz konusu limanlarda mevsimsellikle başa çıkma stratejileri oluşturulmalıdır.

Keywords

• Mevsimsellik
• Kruvaziyer trafiği
• Kruvaziyer Turizmi
• Limanlar
• Türkiye

References

1. Allison, P. D. (1978). Measures of inequality. American Sociological Review, 43, 865-880.
2. Amelung, B., Nicholls, S. & Viner, D. (2007). Implications of global climate change for tourism flows and seasonality. Journal of Travel Research, 45, 285-296.
3. Anderberg, M. R. (1973). Cluster analysis for applications, Academic Press, United States.
4. Andriotis, K. (2005). Seasonality in Crete: Problem or a way of life. Tourism Economics, 11(2), 207-224.
5. Bar-On, R. R. (1975). Seasonality in tourism: A guide to the analysis of seasonality and trends for policymaking. London: The Economist Intelligence Unit.
6. Bar-On, R. R. (1999). The measurement of seasonality and its economic impacts. Tourism Economics, 5(4), 437-458.
7. Baum, T. & Lundtorp, S. (2001). Seasonality in tourism: An introduction. In T. Baum & S. Lundtorp (Eds.), Seasonality in Tourism (1-4), Netherlands: Pergamon.
8. Bigovic, M. (2011). Quantifying seasonality in tourism: A case study of Montenegro. Academica Touristica, 4(2), 15-32.

9. Brida, J. G., Del Chiappa, G., Meleddu, M. & Pulina, M. (2014). A comparison of residents’ perceptions in two cruise ports in the Mediterranean Sea. International Journal of Tourism Research, 16, 180-190.
10. Bridges, C. C. (1966). Hierarchical cluster analysis. Psychological Reports, 18, 851-854.
11. Brown, C. E. (1998). Applied multivariate statistics in geohydrology and related sciences, Berlin: Springer.
12. Butler, R. (1998). Seasonality in tourism: Issues and implications. The Tourist Review, 3, 18-24.
13. Butler, R. (2001). Seasonality in tourism: Issues and implications. In T. Baum & S. Lundtorp (Eds.), Seasonality in Tourism (5-21), Netherlands: Pergamon.
14. Cannas, R. (2012). An overview of tourism seasonality: Key concepts and policies. Alma Tourism Journal of Tourism Culture and Territorial Development, 3(5), 40-58.
15. Cisneros-Martinez, J. D. & Fernandez-Morales, A. (2016). Seasonal concentration of cruise tourism in the Mediterranean. In Conference on tourism (ICOT 2016)-New challenges and boundaries in tourism: Policies, innovations, and strategies. Retrieved from http://iatour.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/ICOT2016_BOOK_OF_ABSTRACTS_FINAL.pdf
16. CLIA (2022a). CLIA cruise lines. Retrieved from https://cruising.org/en-gb/cruise-lines
17. CLIA (2022b). State of cruise industry outlook. Retrieved from https://cruising.org/en-gb/news-and-research/research/2022/january/state-of-the-cruise-industry-outlook-2022
18. Del Chiappa, G. & Abbate, T. (2016). Island cruise tourism development: A resident’s perspective in the context of Italy. Current Issues in Tourism, 19(13), 1372-1385.
19. DeLurgio, S. A. (1998). Forecasting principles and applications, United States: Irwin McGraw-Hill.
20. Duro, J. A. (2016). Seasonality of hotel demand in the main Spanish provinces: Measurements and decomposition exercises. Tourism Management, 52, 52-63.
21. Duro, J. A. & Turrion-Prats, J. (2019). Tourism seasonality worldwide. Tourism Management Perspectives, 31, 38-53.
22. Duro, J. A. & Turrion-Prats, J. (2021). Territorial versus individual hotel seasonality in a high seasonal destination. Current Issues in Tourism, 24(10), 1402-1417.
23. Duro, J. A. & Turrion-Prats, J. (2022). Seasonality and the contribution of markets: Comparing methods. Tourism Management Perspectives, 43, 1-12.
24. Edwards, A. W. F. & Cavalli-Sforza, L. L. (1965). A method for cluster analysis. International Biometric Society, 21(2), 362-375.
25. Esteve-Perez, J. & Garcia-Sanchez, A. (2017). Characteristics and consequences of the cruise traffic seasonality on ports: The Spanish Mediterranean case. Maritime Policy and Management, 44(3), 358-372.
26. Esteve-Perez, J. & Garcia-Sanchez, A. (2019). Determination of seasonality patterns in the transport of cruise travelers through clustering techniques. The Journal of Navigation, 72, 1417-1434.
27. Esteve-Perez, J. & Garcia-Sanchez, A. (2022). Seasonality of cruise ship activity in neighboring regions. In Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part M: Journal of Engineering for the Maritime Environment. https://doi.org/10.1177/14750902211070224
28. Esteve-Perez, J., Garcia-Sanchez, A. & Munoz-Paupie, A. (2019). Cruise traffic seasonality patterns in the Western Mediterranean and the Adriatic Sea: A challenge to port operators. Coastal Management, 47(4), 362-386.
29. Fernandez-Morales, A. (2003). Decomposing seasonal concentration. Annals of Tourism Research, 30(4), 942-956.
30. Fernandez-Morales, A. & Cisneros-Martinez, J. D. (2019). Seasonal concentration decomposition of cruise tourism demand in Southern Europe. Journal of Travel Research, 58(8), 1389-1407.
31. Fernandez-Morales, A. & Mayorga-Toledano, M. C. (2008). Seasonal concentration of the hotel demand in Costa del Sol: A decomposition by nationalities. Tourism Management, 29(5), 940-949.
32. Ferrante, M., Lo Magno, G. L. & De Cantis, S. (2018). Measuring tourism seasonality across European countries. Tourism Management, 68, 220-235.
33. Flognfeldt, T. (2001). Long-term positive adjustments to seasonality: Consequences of summer tourism in the Jotunheimen area Norway. In T. Baum & S. Lundtorp (Eds.), Seasonality in Tourism (109-117), Netherlands: Pergamon.
34. Hung, K., Wang, S., Guillet, B. D. & Liu, Z. (2019). An overview of cruise tourism research through comparison of cruise studies published in English and Chinese. International Journal of Hospitality Management, 77, 207-216.
35. Jolliffe, L. & Farnsworth, R. (2003). Seasonality in tourism employment: Human resource challenges. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 15(6), 312-316.
36. Karamustafa, K. & Ulama, S. (2010). Measuring the seasonality in tourism with the comparison of different methods. EuroMed Journal of Business, 5(2), 191-214.
37. Kaufman, L. & Rousseeuw, P. (1990). Finding groups in data: An introduction to cluster analysis, New York: John Wiley.
38. Koc, E. & Altinay, G. (2007). An analysis of seasonality in monthly per person tourist spending in Turkish inbound tourism from a market segmentation perspective. Tourism Management, 28, 227-237.
39. Koenig, N. & Bischoff, E. E. (2003). Seasonality of tourism in Wales: A comparative analysis. Tourism Economics, 9(3), 229-254.
40. Koenig-Lewis, N. & Bischoff, E. E. (2005). Seasonality research: The state of the art. International Journal of Tourism Research, 7, 201-219.
41. Lau, P. L. & Koo, T. R. (2022). Multidimensional decomposition of Gini elasticities to quantify the spatiotemporality of travel and tourism distribution. Tourism Management, 88, 1-13.
42. Lau, Y., Yip, T. L. & Kanrak, M. (2022). Fundamental shifts of cruise shipping in the post‐COVID‐19 era. Sustainability, 14, 14990.
43. Leisch, F. (1999). Bagged clustering. Retrieved from https://epub.wu.ac.at/1272/1/document.pdf
44. Li, X., Wang, C. & Ducruet, C. (2021). Cruise trajectory network and seasonality: Empirical evidence from Queen Elizabeth cruise. Maritime Policy and Management, 48(2), 283-298.
45. Lim, C. (2001). Monthly seasonal variations: Asian tourism to Australia. Annals of Tourism Research, 28(1), 68-82.
46. Lim, C. & McAleer, M. (2008). Analyzing seasonal changes in New Zealand’s largest inbound market. Tourism Recreation Research, 33(1), 83-91.
47. Lorenz, M. O. (1905). Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth. American Statistical Association, 9(70), 209-219.
48. Lovie, P. (2005). Coefficient of Variation. In B.Everitt & D. Howell (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Statistics in Behavioral Science. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/0470013192.bsa107
49. Lukovic, T. & Bozic, K. (2011). Seasonality: A factor of crisis or development in cruise tourism. In P. Gibson, A. Papathanassis & P. Milde (Eds.), Cruise sector challenges: Making progress in an uncertain world (25-37), Wiesbaden: Springer.
50. Lundtorp, S. (2001). Measuring tourism seasonality. In T. Baum & S. Lundtorp (Eds.), Seasonality in Tourism (23-51), Netherlands: Pergamon.
51. Manning, R. E. & Powers, L. A. (1984). Peak and off-peak use: Redistributing the outdoor recreation/tourism load. Journal of Travel Research, 23(2), 25-31.
52. Mansfield, E. (1991). Statistics for business and economics, United States: W. W. Norton.
53. MedCruise (2016). Cruise activities in MedCruise ports: Statistics 2015 Retrieved from http://www.medcruise.com/sites/default/files/cruise_activities_in_medcruise_ports_statistics_2015_final_0.pdf
54. MedCruise (2022). 2021 statistics: Cruise activities in MedCruise ports. Retrieved from https://www.medcruise.com/news/3d-flip-book/2021-statistics-report
55. Milanovic, B. (1997). A simple way to calculate the Gini coefficient, and some implications. Economics Letters, 56(1), 45-49.
56. Murtagh, F. & Contreras, P. (2012). Algorithms for hierarchical clustering: an overview. WIREs Data Mining Knowledge Discovery, 2, 86-97.
57. Nadal, J. R., Font, A. R. & Rossello, A. S. (2004). The economic determinants of seasonal patterns. Annals of Tourism Research, 31(3), 697-711.
58. Petrevska, B. (2013). A simple test for the presence of seasonality in tourism in Macedonia. In: 1st International Conference Regional Economic Cooperation in the process of Globalization, 6-7 Dec 2013, Tetovo, Macedonia.
59. Rodrigue, J. P., Comtois, C. & Slack, B. (2013). The geography of transport systems, Abingdon: Routledge.
60. Rodrigue, J. P. & Notteboom, T. (2012). The cruise industry: itineraries, not destinations. Port Technology International, Retrieved from https://wpassets.porttechnology.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/25181950/013-016.pdf
61. Rodrigue, J. P. & Notteboom, T. (2013). The geography of cruises: Itineraries, not destinations. Applied Geography, 38(2013), 31-42.
62. Rossello, J., & Sanso, A. (2017). Yearly, monthly and weekly seasonality of tourism demand: A decomposition analysis. Tourism Management, 60, 379-389.
63. Sainaghi, R., Mauri, A. & d’Angella, F. (2019). Decomposing seasonality in an urban destination: The case of Milan, Current Issues in Tourism, 22(16), 1919-1924.
64. Sasirekha, K. & Baby, P. (2013). Agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm: A review. International Journal of Scientific and Research Publications, 3(3), 1-3.
65. Stojcic, N., Mikulic, J. & Vizek, M. (2022). High season, low growth: The impact of tourism seasonality and vulnerability to tourism on the emergence of high-growth firms. Tourism Management, 89, 1-5.
66. Sun, X., Wu, X. & Feng, X. (2015). Cruise tourism seasonality: an empirical study on the North American market. Tourism Tribune, 30(5), 117-126.
67. Sutcliffe, C. M. S. & Sinclair, M. T. (1980). The measurement of seasonality within the tourist industry: an application to tourist arrivals in Spain. Applied Economics, 12(4), 429-441.
68. Theil, H. (1967). Economics and information theory, Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company.
69. The Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (2022). Kruvaziyer istatistikleri. Retrieved from https://denizcilikistatistikleri.uab.gov.tr/kruvaziyer-istatistikleri
70. Turrion-Prats, J. & Duro, J. A. (2018). Tourist seasonality and the role of markets. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 8, 23-31.
71. Turrion-Prats, J. & Duro, J. A. (2019). Seasonality determinants for the main markets in Spain. International Journal of Tourism Research, 21(4), 462-477.
72. Wang, K., Wang, S., Zhen, L. & Qu, X. (2016). Cruise shipping review: Operations planning and research opportunities. Maritime Business Review, 1(2), 133-148.
73. Wanhill, S. R. C. (1980). Tackling seasonality: A technical note. International Journal of Tourism Management, 1(4), 243-245.
74. Ward, J. H. (1963). Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 58(301), 236-244.
75. Yacoumis, J. (1980). Tackling seasonality: The case of Sri Lanka. International Journal of Tourism Management, 1(2), 84-98. Yitzhaki, S. & Lerman, R. I. (1991). Income stratification and income inequality. Review of Income and Wealth, 37(3), 313-329.