Purpose: The cruise industry has witnessed steady growth, with passenger volume increasing from 17.8 million in 2009 to 30 million in 2019. In the context of global competition and an uncertain business environment, competition in business has changed dramatically from battles of “firm versus firm” to “supply chain versus supply chain”. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to understand the cruise industry from a chain perspective, which has not drawn widespread research attention.Design/methodology/approach: This paper brings together the insights, opinions, concepts and frameworks from a literature review of different disciplines (maritime shipping, tourism management, logistics management, operations management and supply chain management) and analysis results from 22 semi-structured interviews to make an early attempt to conceptualise the cruise supply chain (CSC).Findings: The cruise supply chain is elaborated on the process, the role of each entity and its characteristics by comparing with the maritime supply chain and tourism supply chain. Based on the understanding of the CSC, two specific characteristics of the Chinese CSC are examined, which need further investigation.Originality/value: The CSC is articulated with detailed processes and characteristics based on the literature review and empirical study. The findings of this paper not only advance the knowledge of the supply chain in the cruise industry but also highlight the importance of further research on the CSC.

The cruise shipping market has been growing dynamically in the past two decades. This study presented an empirical analysis of the Asian cruise shipping network (ACSN) in which the nodes are cruise ports and links are cruise routes connecting the ports, using complex network analysis. An analysis of 245 voyages operated by 16 cruise lines between 215 ports in 26 countries found that ports in the ACSN are connected by 704 links. The ACSN is a small-world network with a small average path length and a high clustering coefficient, and its degree distribution follows an exponential function. A small number of ports have high connectivity, and most ports have low connections. Most high-degree ports connect to low-degree ports. The important roles and properties of ports vary depending on centrality measures.