Representing global cruise tourism: a paradox of sustainability

This paper explores the notion of sustainability for the cruise industry, as a rhetorical/semiotic construct in the companies’ promotional campaigns. It offers some reflections from the perspective of cruise tourism management, and highlights the need for responsible tourist service providers to balance rent-seeking activities with the need to preserve natural and cultural resources. As part of an innovative, multi-disciplinary approach, and from a broadly critical perspective, it asks whether the concept has any meaning as used in these contexts, or whether the notion of corporate greenwashing (Ramus & Montiel, 2005) must be invoked to account for its use. Linguistic analysis focuses on the strategies for marketing sustainable tourism in the worldwide web, through slogans, buzzwords, lists of environmentally friendly practices and other semantic and multimodal features that occur on the sites.