Abstract
Tourism is a complex and comprehensive industrial sector comprised of multiple major stakeholders and players who work in unison to ensure that their local and international clients get the best experiences. And the cruise tourism industry is among the fastest-growing economic segments in the globe. The general purpose of this studies is to enable researcher to understand the decision-making process made by cruise tourists, and the findings help service providers to identify markets that they can target, and also enhance customer satisfaction rates. Researcher have conceptualised several models to help in understanding the decision-making process of cruise tourists. On the other hand, there are fewer studies which have focused on examining the factors empirically. Examining the decision-making processes among tourists in purchasing products and services helps tourism practitioners to be better equipped to offer higher quality services to visitors and thus enhance customer satisfaction.
This study adopted a qualitative research approach to pursue research on the factors influencing cruise passengers’ activity decision-making in a tourism destination. The author embraced a realism paradigm as a research philosophy often utilised in research to derive the right knowledge from science as the foundation of research. The researcher utilised intercept interviews to collect data on the factors influencing passengers’ decision-making activity in a tourism destination. Dunedin Railway Station and Port Chalmers were selected as the locations for the real-time interviews to get the opinions of the passengers while on the move. The researcher used thematic analysis to highlight and emphasise the crucial information that would lead to the result making the process and a conclusion of the study. Analysis of the data collected showed that there is a significant difference in the behaviour of cruise passengers compared to other tourism activities, particularly in the decision-making process. The contribution of the study is that it presents a straight-forward model that can be used in exploring the behavioural patterns and the decision-making processes of cruise passengers and tourists.