Cruise Travelers’ Service Perceptions: An Evidence from Cruise Passengers’ Reviews by Using Leximancer

Given the cruise sector's importance to the tourism industry and the dearth of prior research in this area, this study qualitatively explores cruise tourists' perceptions of cruise-line services by evaluating the cruise attributes that matter to passengers. Leximancer 4.5 software is used to analyze 2000 voluntarily submitted customer evaluations on a cruise guide website (cruisecritic.com) in order to discover main cruise tourism themes and then assess whether these themes are conveyed negatively or positively. Eight of the most popular cruise ships, as determined by cruisecritic.com, were chosen. The cruise's perceived quality was described around ten themes, according to the analysis. “Ship”, “staff”, “food”, “entertainment”, “room”, “area”, “embarkation”, “excursion”, “disembarkation” and “port” are the themes that found as dominant themes shared by cruise travelers in their narratives. Furthermore, the results show that themes like “ship”, “staff”, “food”, “entertainment”, “room” and “area” are associated with high satisfaction (excellent/very good), in contrast, “embarkation”, “disembarkation”, “excursion” and “port” are associated with low satisfaction (poor/terrible).