What Is The Legal External Environment Affect The Cruise Industry?

The legal external environment, related to the international and national laws, may affect the cruise industry. Cruise companies often try to avoid legal factors such as national taxes and labour laws by registering their organisation and cruise liners in foreign countries with a weak political environment, such as Panama, the Bahamas, and Liberia (Burke, 2009). This is often stated as the ‘flag of convenience’. This frequently results in employees of cruises being underpaid, mistreated and they will often lack the ability to purse lawsuits. This is an important factor to consider when internationalising as if a cruise liner is not registered in a country with adequate laws, such as the US or the UK, then those laws will not apply and commonly cruise customers will be under maritime regulation (Burke, 2009). The legal and medical rights of customers and overall experience can become significantly compromised and affected by a cruise ships country of registration (London, 2011). Thus, many customers suffer problems when trying to claim liability from problems occurring on board their cruises …show more content…
Furthermore this could act as a threat to the Antarctica cruise industry and have a negative effect on tourist numbers. This could result in the need for tourist’s attractions to be adapted and international marketers to search for new and additional sites of interest for their consumers (Maher et al., 2010). Nevertheless, despite the potential threats, a longer season of Arctic cruise tourism will cause the attraction of cruise tourists, along with Antarctica tourists with the motivations of ‘last chance tourism’, and industry could see a huge opportunity and growth in tourism demand to both Polar Regions (Maher et al.,