Your Guess is as Good as Mine: Finding Your Way on Board a Cruise Ship

Abstract

Wayfinding on board a large cruise ship might be mistakenly thought to be easy and straightforward, and this may well account for the absence of literature on this topic. This paper will address this gap by exploring and exposing the influences that shape our everyday practices while cruising, itself a moving experience, carrying us by consent across the seas to distant shores. The need to address on-site experiences is not as Pearce (2011) points out, always fully investigated in post-holiday satisfaction surveys, and so this exploration of how passengers react and respond to their cruise ship surroundings exposes the scale, and sometimes overwhelming enormity, of some of these vessels now selling a mass tourism product.