This summer was the first time 31-year-old Daisie Morrison had been on a cruise when she set sail on a two-week holiday with two friends, also in their early 30s. "One of my friends suggested it," she says. "She had seen different influencers on Instagram going on cruises. You go to so many places that we wanted to visit, so we were all quite keen."
The previous summer, Morrison says, she had been on a group holiday in Italy, which in contrast had involved "spending a lot of time, money and stress" getting around. With the cruise, "you just wake up in a new place every day".
Morrison is part of a generation of holidaymakers who are at the heart of the expansion of an industry once seen as the preserve of rich retired couples. The number of passengers taking ocean cruises has more than doubled from 13 million in 2004 to nearly 32 million - and that is despite the devastation to the industry in the pandemic.
The Cruise Lines International Association (Clia) expects this number to approach 40 million in 2027, and says the key to such growth will be attracting millions of new-to-cruise travellers. Millennials, it reports, are "the most enthusiastic cruise travellers of the future".
It is not surprising that the industry needs a new target market, when many cruise ships "can start to feel a bit like care homes at sea", says Xavier Font, a professor at the University of Surrey who has studied the industry. "So the cruise companies need an entirely new brand of ship. They are then turning these into either the party cruise ship, say, or the family cruise ship."
As the industry has expanded and ships have become much more numerous and visible, this has increased concerns about the environmental impact of this type of holiday. But Font believes this is having little impact on the popularity of cruises.
This story is from the November 30, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
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This story is from the November 30, 2024 edition of The Guardian.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
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