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Introduction
Cruises represent one of the fastest growing tourism segments. The latest trend of mega-ships (or mega-liners), carrying over 6,000 passengers and crew and containing shopping malls, several restaurants, theatres and various sport facilities, may tempt a casual observer to synonymise "cruise tourism" with "floating resorts". Yet, despite the dominant presence of a "floating hotel", a cruise holiday takes place mostly on land. For the vast majority of offerings, the itinerary (or route) reflects a key component and differentiator of a cruise holiday, particularly for the European source markets. Behind every organised cruise, there is a value chain comprising ports/destinations, transport companies, destination management companies and ship-chandlers/F&B suppliers. Cruise packages typically include transport to/from embarkation/disembarkation ports and various excursion packages at the ports of call. Therefore, before proceeding with providing an overview of the key state-of-the-art issues and challenges surrounding cruise tourism, it is pertinent to provide a working definition of the phenomenon at hand:
Cruise tourism is a socio-economic system generated by the interaction between human, organisational and geographical entities, aimed at producing maritime-transportation-enabled leisure experiences. (Papathanassis and Beckmann, 2011, p. 166).
At this point, it is important to clarify the aims and scope of this contribution. As the title suggests, this is a "state-of-the-art" type of paper, aiming at:
* synthesising knowledge;
* giving readers a comprehensive overview of the topic; and
* identifying key areas for future research.
Hence, it is conceptual, using existing literature and the author's expertise to provide a comprehensive and coherent overview of everything relevant to the topic. Meeting this requirement, within the limited scope of a single paper, implies a trade-off between scope width and content depth. To enable the reader(s) to navigate through the wide range of issues covered, the paper's structural-logical overview is explicitly described and elaborated (also refer to Figure 4). The paper consists of three main parts. The first part provides a comprehensive thematic overview of cruise tourism [Figure 1 - Cruise Entities, inter-Relationships and Themes (CruisERT) framework] and proceeds in describing the themes, focusing on the management challenge(s) corresponding to each one. The second part explores current developments, advances and practices in the cruise sector (e.g. smart ships and big data) and examines their potential in relation to the aforementioned challenges. The...