Passengers head ashore at Amber Cove in the Dominican Republic.
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon

More passengers, they say, mean economic growth for the islands.

But an investigation by Centro de Periodismo Investigativo and The BVI Beacon found that passenger numbers tell only part of the story.

In interviews across the region, critics including researchers, business owners, environmentalists, tour operators and hoteliers argued that the Caribbean cruise bargain has long favored the industry over island destinations.

Now, they see the scale tipping further as the sector expands: The islands, they said, are absorbing increasing congestion, environmental damage and infrastructure pressure while cruise lines find new ways to capture more passenger spending before it ever reaches local communities.

“What are they really benefiting from when they come to the Caribbean?” asked Trinidadian economist Marla Dukharan. “It’s really our sun, sea and sand. Are we capitalizing properly on our sun, sea and sand, or are we all racing to the bottom and competing with each other to give the tourists the lowest price — which means we are not reaping the financial benefits?”

Decades of Growth

The modern cruise industry was built on scale.

In 1970, about half a million people worldwide took cruises. Since then, the industry has grown into a mass-market business that rebounded quickly even after the pandemic brought it to a near-total standstill for more than a year.

In 2025, a record 37.2 million people globally took an ocean-going cruise, up from 29.7 million in 2019, according to the Cruise Lines International Association. An industry-leading 44% of them — more than 16 million passengers — sailed itineraries in the Caribbean, Bahamas, and Bermuda, which typically include multiple port visits.

The ships have grown too. The Pacific Princess, made famous by the television show “The Love Boat” in the late 1970s, was about 550 feet long and carried a little over 600 passengers.

Today, Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, one of the largest cruise ships now sailing the Caribbean, can carry as many as 7,600 passengers and more than 2,000 crewmembers. Across its 20 decks are more than 20 dining options, 14 retail venues, seven pools, a waterpark, a surf simulator, and a thrill ride that swings guests high above the ocean.

For passengers, the appeal is straightforward. A cruise vacation, which often comes with a relatively modest upfront price tag, includes meals, entertainment and visits to multiple destinations.

“It’s just the fact that you can go to different islands and see and just learn about their islands,” Dana Kaiser, a tourist from Missouri, said during a February visit to the BVI with family and friends aboard the 4,070-passenger-capacity Norwegian Epic. “That’s what interests us a lot.”

Dana Kaiser, third from right, poses with family and friends in front of the Norwegian Epic in Road Town in the British Virgin Islands.
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon

For Caribbean governments, the promise is equally clear. Cruise passengers fill taxis, book excursions, buy jewelry and T-shirts, visit restaurants and bars, pay port fees, and help support jobs in places where tourism is often the largest employer.

In some communities, entire economies have grown up around the sector.

“Without this industry, our island simply can’t function, because we have very limited diversification in the economic sector,” said Ed Forbes, an eco-tour operator in Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands. “It’s really our lifeline.”

The cruise pier that opened on Grand Turk in 2006 has helped transform the island’s economy, which had long struggled to replace the salt industry that collapsed in the 1960s.

But Mr. Forbes is keenly aware of the trade-offs: dredging to build the pier, reef damage from silt stirred up by ships, and heavy beach traffic from an industry that can more than double the island’s population of about 5,000 on busy days.

“You’re choosing between the environment and the economy,” he said. “And Grand Turk in particular, a tiny island like this, we need both of those to survive.”

Video by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon

Cruise lines say they work hard to strike that balance responsibly.

“The cruise industry are committed citizens,” said Michele Paige, the longtime CEO of the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association (FCCA), the industry’s main lobby group in the region. “We really care about the destinations... If you do business with the community, you have to be involved with the community, and the cruise industry is.”

A Shifting Balance?

Critics say the balance has increasingly shifted in cruise lines’ favor.

Dr. Ross Klein, a Canada-based sociologist who has written extensively on the industry and taken dozens of cruises himself, has long argued that cruise lines overstate economic benefits and downplay impacts.

Meanwhile, he said, they have become increasingly skilled at capturing passenger spending through approved-vendor arrangements, shore-excursion commissions, onboard retail and other strategies.

Researchers have highlighted such tactics for decades. A 2007 study of Croatian ports, for instance, estimated that cruise lines retained about 60% of the price paid for excursions sold on board.

But Dr. Klein said the imbalance has only intensified.

“The industry has become more and more sophisticated in playing ports in ways that the port gets less and less and the cruise ship ends up with more and more,” Dr. Klein said, adding, “Ports don’t even realize that they’re giving away things they shouldn’t be giving away.”

The logical endpoint of this approach, Dr. Klein said, is the private destination. Under that increasingly popular model, cruise lines own or lease an island or coastline that is often closed to the public, diverting calls away from traditional Caribbean ports and sometimes using their own staff to serve food and drinks supplied by their ships.

Today, there are at least a dozen private cruise destinations in the wider Caribbean, up from about six a decade ago.

“If you’ve got a private island seeing 365 ships in a year, that’s 365 port calls that don’t happen in the Caribbean,” Dr. Klein said.

Ms. Dukharan, the economist, said the same dynamic is playing out on board as the ships grow larger.

“The cruise lines are more and more becoming the destination,” she said. “They’re not interested in people coming off the ship and spending money in your restaurant. They’re interested in that spend staying in their wallet.”

A Welcoming Region

At several European ports, rapid cruise growth has drawn public backlash in recent years.

In Venice and Marseille, activists protesting overtourism have used canoes and other small boats to block cruise ships. In Barcelona, protestors have sprayed passengers with water pistols.

The Caribbean has been more welcoming.

Video by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon

Across much of the region, governments have actively courted the latest megaships, expanding piers and other port infrastructure even as local debates have intensified during the post-pandemic boom.

The Bahamas, the first or last stop for many Caribbean cruises out of Florida, has led the way.

Buoyed by new private cruise destinations — including Carnival’s $600 million Celebration Key on Grand Bahama and Disney’s up-to-$400 million Lookout Cay at Lighthouse Point in Eleuthera — the country clocked a region-high 10.6 million cruise arrivals in 2025, outnumbering its overnight arrivals by nearly six to one.

“I wouldn’t use the term ‘expanding’ to the Bahamas,” said Eric Carey, a former executive director of the Bahamas National Trust. “I would probably use ‘exploding.’ The cruise industry really has expanded at a very rapid rate in the Bahamas and throughout the Caribbean.”

The boom, however, hasn’t reached all destinations evenly. Bahamas cruise arrivals have almost doubled since 2019, and the Dominican Republic’s climbed even more sharply, from roughly 1.1 million in 2019 to nearly 2.8 million in 2025. Several other destinations also saw increases over the period, ranging from about 9% in Curaçao to roughly 52% in the BVI.

But others — including Puerto Rico, Sint Maarten and Barbados — did not yet regain 2019 levels last year even though year-on-year numbers grew amid pier investments and other official growth efforts.

As such islands compete for calls, a few communities have pushed back against the industry in recent years. In the Cayman Islands last year, voters rejected cruise-berthing infrastructure in a referendum by a margin of nearly 69%.

“Our message was always quality over quantity,” said Michelle Lockwood, a founding member of Cruise Port Referendum Cayman, which advocated against the proposed expansion. “We didn’t want to lose what made us Caymanian.”

In Cozumel, Mexico, federal environmental authorities in February effectively halted plans for a fourth cruise pier after years of litigation and community opposition centered largely around environmental concerns.

Other islands are still deciding on their strategy.

A man fishes near the Icon of the Seas, one of the three largest cruise ships in the world, at PortMiami.
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon

Asked whether the BVI should stop at the number of cruise passengers projected for this year, she grinned.

“Keep going,” she said. “Keep on going.”

That view is popular with taxi drivers, as well as some entrepreneurs who run businesses in the pier park and other areas that cater to cruise visitors.

But many resort operators, villa owners and yacht charterers strongly disagree.

They argue that the vacation experience of overnight visitors — who spend more time and money in the territory — suffers when cruise crowds overwhelm popular attractions like Cane Garden Bay beach on the island of Tortola and The Baths on Virgin Gorda.

“Expanding our cruise pier to accommodate larger ships without first addressing the strain on our already inadequate infrastructure is not just premature — it is irresponsible,” said Sharon Flax-Brutus, a former BVI tourism director who now manages high-end villas on Virgin Gorda.“If the cruise industry is to continue benefiting from our shores, then it must also be part of the solution — through meaningful, sustained investment in the destinations that sustain it.”

Ms. Paige said such steps are already in the works in the territory, including moves to reduce overcrowding at The Baths and other attractions.

“We’ve worked very diligently with the [National Parks] to not only look at different opportunities but also have some of the cruise lines invest in infrastructure in the BVI,” she said.

Premier Natalio “Sowande” Wheatley, the tourism minister, has spoken similarly, pushing for cruise growth while also stressing the government’s commitment to balance.

“Let me say clearly: My government values the cruise sector. Because cruise tourism supports hardworking Virgin Islanders: taxi operators, tour providers, restaurants, retailers, vendors, small businesses, and families whose livelihoods depend on visitor activity,” Mr. Wheatley said during his annual State of the Territory Address in June, adding, “We understand very well, however, how overcrowding can negatively impact the visitor experience, and that is why we are laser focused on developing additional attractions for wider distribution of visitors.”

At Brandini’s Lemonade, Mr. Andrew said he is not opposed to the cruise industry. He built his business in part to serve it.

But after selling lemonade near the pier park for about three years, he said his most reliable customers are residents and overnight visitors, and he is not convinced that bigger ships would mean more business for vendors like him.

“They just want to be here to say, ‘I’ve been to — boom — take a picture,’” he said of many passengers from the largest ships that currently call in the BVI. “How does the people of the BVI benefit from that, outside of taxi drivers?”

At the nearby Crafts Alive Village, vendors have long complained that cruise passengers are shuttled too quickly from ships to taxis to beaches, leaving little time for local stalls.

“The cruise ships are coming, but like everything else, we are not really, you know, making money,” said village vendor Rasheda Durante, who has sold handmade dolls and other goods to cruise tourists for about three decades. “We’ve been just holding on, and that’s about it.”

Rasheda shows one of the dolls she sells at Crafts Alive Village in Road Town.
Photo by Freeman Rogers | The BVI Beacon

Billion-Dollar Promises

When Caribbean leaders defend cruise expansion, they often cite economic-impact studies published by the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association (FCCA).

The latest, released in 2024, estimated that cruise tourism generated more than $4 billion in direct expenditures across 33 destinations in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South America during the 2023-2024 cruise year.

Those figures included passenger spending, crew spending, port fees, taxes and cruise-line purchases. The study also said the spending supported more than 94,000 jobs and about $1.28 billion in wages that year.

“What the cruise industry brings should never be looked at as just taxation,” Ms. Paige said. “Number one, the cruise industry spends billions of dollars marketing the destinations. … Number two, then we do bring the ships, and we pay for the privilege of bringing the ships.”

Ms. Paige described cruise tourism as relatively low-impact and pushed back against the claim that it harms the overnight sector. Overnight visitors, she said, typically spend days in a destination, while cruise passengers stay just for a few hours — and sometimes return for longer visits themselves.

She also defended private cruise destinations, saying that they spread visitors beyond crowded ports, improve guest experiences and create jobs.

“We are trying to augment the experiences,” Ms. Paige said. “We try to provide to the guests what they want, and we’ve been begging the destinations for more product.”

The Missing Numbers

Critics say the industry’s preferred numbers are incomplete at best.

A 2018 study Dr. Klein and other researchers conducted in Halifax, Nova Scotia, found that cruise lines overestimated passenger spending at the port by about 30%. He has also questioned the transparency of the FCCA-commissioned studies, noting that the association does not release all the underlying data.

Ms. Dukharan said the bigger problem is the studies’ fundamental approach: They assess economic inflows without measuring social and environmental impacts such as congestion, road maintenance, policing, waste management, reef damage or the opportunity cost of using limited coastal land for cruise infrastructure.

“No country in the Caribbean has done an economic impact assessment of the tourism sector, and I think it’s because the politicians know that the story is not going to be as rosy as them standing up and saying, ‘500,000 people visited this year,’” Ms. Dukharan said, adding, “The politicians prioritize arrivals over value. Why? Because they’ve never measured value.”