Cruise ship levies - design, implementation and impacts: international evidence review

5. Conclusion

This report sets out the findings of a desk-based evidence review on the impact of cruise ship levies in the context of international jurisdictions. Cruise ship taxation and specifically, cruise tourism taxes are a relatively new phenomena within a developing policy landscape. This means that both practice and policy in this area are changing frequently and it is likely that new data on the impacts of cruise ship levies may become available in the future.

The available evidence from international cases, as summarised in sections three and four of this review, demonstrates that in many jurisdictions where cruise ship levies have been applied or considered, the justification for their consideration has been either real or perceived negative impacts related to cruise tourism (MedCruise, 2024). These impacts have included:

• Overcrowding of public spaces (Gutberlet, 2020; Hoarau-Heemstra et al., 2023),
• Environmental issues (Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2017; Wang and Chambers, 2023), and
• Damage to infrastructure including both natural and built heritage (Fridriksson, Wise, and Scott, 2020; Cardona, Fernández, and Criado, 2019).

Despite these commonalities, in practice there are a wide variety of approaches to cruise ship taxation not only in terms of the amounts being charged, but how fees are determined, how their collection is managed and how funds collected are subsequently allocated. In spite of these variations, the most popular approach to charging the levies, across the cases reviewed here, is on a per passenger basis. Furthermore, the most common, although not universal, exceptions to the levy are for embarking/disembarking passengers, young children, or in cases of emergency. The evidence outlined herein suggests that the impacts of cruise tourism on jurisdictions are highly context specific (Hoarau-Heemstra et al., 2023). However, in the majority of cases where data on the levies’ impacts was available, the findings outline that:

• Where the levies were introduced rapidly or within a short timeframe, (e.g. announced and operationalised within two months, as in Amsterdam) their introduction did lead to a reduction in cruise ship calls but only in the short term.
• Once the levy had been in place for a period of time, cruise ship calls returned to pre-levy volume, and have, in some jurisdictions continued to increase.
• Where levies were introduced following longer planning cycles, as in Dubrovnik where the levy was planned and introduced over a two-year period, the impact on the number of cruise ship calls was negligible.