The Creation of Sustainable Value from Cruise Tourism : An Empirical Study on Gotland, Sweden

Sammanfattning: Nowadays, cruise tourism is playing a significant role in international tourism and has brought vital economic benefits to ports and destinations. Apart from the economic impact, cruise tourism can also influence a destination in social and environmental aspects. Many researchers have highlighted that understanding how value creation can be achieved from cruise arrivals is vital to local businesses and cruise destinations. However, current research on the value creation of cruise tourism has some gaps such as the limited study sites and the lack of research on social and environmental aspects of sustainability. Gotland is the largest island in the Baltic Sea. As a newly constructed cruise destination, research about the island is not yet as much as destinations like the Caribbean, and the existing research has primarily used qualitative methods. This thesis draws on data from the sustainable visits project in 2018 and uses multiple regression research methods to construct three regression models for empirically analyzing the relationships between on-shore activity, tourism information and tourist's satisfaction on Gotland, and the impact of destination satisfaction on expenditure behavior. The purpose of this thesis is to study the sustainable value creation of cruise tourism on Gotland, Sweden, and contribute to the sustainable development of it as a tourism destination. The study results show that the more abundant on-shore activities one enjoys, the higher the cruiser’s destination satisfaction. The more tourism information about the destination one knows, the higher the cruiser’s destination satisfaction. The higher the cruiser’s destination satisfaction, the larger the cruiser's expenditure in the destination is. Thus, it is suggested to all stakeholders work on enriching on-shore activities as well as providing more high-quality tourism information through collaboration, and thus bringing more tourism expenditure.