Decomposing the price of the cruise product into tourism and transport attributes: Evidence from the Mediterranean market

The price composition of the cruise product is described by a high level of complexity, since it incorporates both tourist and transport dimensions. Despite that research on cruise sector is advancing, the international literature still lacks of studies focusing explicitly on the composition of cruise product's price. Within this concept, this paper decomposes the price of cruise packages into tourism- and transport-driven characteristics and it builds on the established method of hedonic price modeling (HPM), which is applied on data drafted from the scheduled trips of two contemporary cruise lines for the Mediterranean, to measure their contribution in the final formation of the offered price. The overall analysis validates that the contribution of tourism attributes outweighs this of transport attributes, whereas a high proportion of price variability is also attributed to the different marketing targets adopted by companies, even for those belonging to the same class.