Somewhere out at sea, somewhere between the buffet, the lifts, the bingo, the theatre, the shops and a few thousand other people on holiday, I started wondering about something.
How on earth do they make all of this work?
How can several thousand people eat, sleep, be entertained, go ashore, come back, be moved around by buses, have their cabins cleaned and be served dinner – every single day?
The answer is actually quite simple.
Systems.
The cruise ship I lived on for twelve days was not just a ship. It was a hotel, restaurant, theatre, shopping centre, bar, spa, means of transport, casino and excursion operator all at once.
Everything had to work.
And most of the time, it actually did.
But as I walked around the ship, I began to wonder whether this might be mass tourism in one of its purest forms.
Or perhaps we could call it assembly-line tourism?
At the very least, I felt as though I was observing the industrialisation of tourism.
Because when very large numbers of people are going to be on holiday at the same time, the holiday itself inevitably has to be organised almost like a production process.
But mass tourism began long before cruise ships
People have travelled for thousands of years, of course. But for a very long time, travelling purely for pleasure was mainly something available to people with money, time and the freedom to be away.
Then came the railway.
In 1841, the British businessman Thomas Cook organised a train journey from Leicester to Loughborough for around 500 people. The brilliant part was not the train. Trains already existed. Source
What was new was that someone organised the journey for you.
Cook understood something that remains at the heart of package tourism today: many people are happy to travel if someone else removes the uncertainty and takes care of transport, timing and the practical details. His company later developed organised tours throughout Britain and abroad.
But mass tourism as we know it today was still a long way off.
Another condition had to be met.
Ordinary people needed both time and money to travel.
Paid holidays became increasingly common in Europe between the two world wars and, according to tourism historians, helped lay important foundations for modern mass tourism. After the Second World War, several decades of economic growth followed across much of Western Europe. More people could afford holidays, paid time off became more common, and commercial package holidays gradually brought within reach what had previously been reserved for people with considerable means.
Then came the aeroplanes.
And that really changed things.
The Mediterranean became accessible to ordinary people
During the 1950s and 1960s, charter flights and package holidays began changing the way Europeans travelled.
Suddenly, people who might never have organised a foreign holiday themselves could buy the entire trip as one package.
Flight. Hotel. Transport. Perhaps meals. A representative met you. A bus was waiting. Someone else had found the hotel.
All you had to do was turn up.
Norway’s first charter flight to Mallorca took place in 1959. From the late 1960s onwards, standardised charter holidays became increasingly common, particularly to beach destinations around the Mediterranean, Portugal and the Canary Islands.
In many ways, it was a small revolution.
Because mass tourism also has a history of democratisation.
We should not forget that.
Something that had previously been available mainly to a small economic elite suddenly became possible for ordinary workers and families.
The factory worker from Manchester, the teacher from Oslo and the office worker from Hamburg could now all lie on a beach in Spain.
That was no small thing.
It was freedom.
But freedom had to be organised
And this is where the paradox begins.
The more people who gain access to the same freedom, the more that freedom has to be organised.
The planes have to be filled. Hotels have to be built. Buses have to run. Meals have to be served. Beaches need sunbeds. Guides have to meet the groups.
And if prices are to remain low, large numbers of people need to buy roughly the same product.
That is when standardisation begins.
- The same type of hotel.
- The same buffet.
- The same excursion.
- The same meeting point.
- The same bus.
- The same attraction.
- And preferably at the same time.
That does not necessarily mean the experience is bad.
But it is produced.
That struck me quite strongly during the cruise.
I was not only a traveller.
I was also one of several thousand units being moved through an extremely efficient system.
Then came the cruise ships
Modern cruising developed alongside this new era of mass tourism.
As aeroplanes gradually took over more and more of the traditional passenger traffic across the oceans, ships had to find a new role.
The ship would no longer simply take you to your holiday.
The ship itself would become the holiday.
Norwegian Caribbean Line, later Norwegian Cruise Line, began weekly sailings from Miami to the Caribbean in 1966 and describes this itself as the beginning of a new type of holiday at sea, where the ship became a destination in its own right. Source
Royal Caribbean was established in 1969 and Carnival Cruise Line in 1972. Carnival explicitly described its ambition as making a type of holiday previously associated with wealthy travellers available to a much broader audience.
Then the ships began to grow.
More cabins. More restaurants. More swimming pools. More bars. Bigger theatres. Shops. Spas. Casinos. Activities from morning until night.
Eventually, the cruise ship became a floating holiday city.
And the economics are quite interesting.
The ticket is only the beginning
Before I went on the cruise, I probably thought about it in a fairly traditional way.
I buy the journey.
The company makes money from the journey.
Of course, it is not that simple.
Cruise companies themselves distinguish between revenue from passenger tickets and revenue from what passengers purchase while on board. Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, for example, includes casinos, beverages, excursions, speciality dining, shops, spas and Wi-Fi in what it calls “onboard and other revenue.”
That was exactly what I observed.
- The drinks package.
- The excursions.
- The internet.
- The spa.
- The massages.
- The skincare treatments.
- The bingo.
- The casino.
- The shops.
- The speciality restaurants and bars.
And the photographers who photographed us again and again, after which printed photographs appeared, waiting to be sold to us.
The passenger is therefore not merely a guest who has already paid.
The passenger remains a potential customer at all times. And this is where the cruise ship becomes almost fascinating as a business model.
The customer lives inside the shop.
Why did the ships become so large?
Because size can create efficiency.
One kitchen can produce an enormous number of meals. One performance can entertain a large audience.
The same swimming pool, the same bar, the same reception desk and the same infrastructure can be used by large numbers of people.
And this logic also leaves its mark on the design itself.
When thousands of people are going to use the same areas every day, the furniture has to withstand heavy use. It must be easy to clean, easy to move and capable of serving one group of people after another.
The result is rows of identical tables and chairs, large open spaces and interiors that often appear to be designed primarily around capacity and flow.
I noticed this particularly clearly when I took photographs very early in the morning, or on the one day when I returned to the ship before most of the other passengers.
When the people disappeared, the structure became visible. Rows of chairs. Identical tables. Large open spaces. Hundreds of seats.
When the ship is full, you see the tourists. When it is empty, you see the system. And when many people buy the same product, the cost per guest can be reduced.
It is not so different from other parts of the economy.
We mass-produce clothes. Food. Cars. Electronics.
Why would we not also mass-produce holidays? That is, in many ways, what mass tourism does. It makes experiences scalable. And commercially, that has been extraordinarily successful.
According to the Cruise Lines International Association, around 37.2 million people took ocean cruises in 2025.
A record.
If we look at international tourism as a whole, the development becomes even clearer.
In around 1950, just over 25 million international tourist arrivals were recorded worldwide. In 2024, UN Tourism recorded around 1.4 billion.
These figures should not be read as 1.4 billion individual people – one person may account for several journeys – but they still demonstrate how dramatically international tourism has grown.
Within a few decades, we have transformed international travel from a privilege enjoyed by relatively few people into an enormous global industry.
That is quite extraordinary. And it creates problems. Both things can be true at the same time.
When everyone wants to go to the same place
This is perhaps where mass tourism meets its greatest paradox.
We want to experience something authentic. An old town. A beautiful beach. A small fishing village. A historic square. A local café.
But when millions of us want to experience the same “authentic” place, the place itself inevitably begins to change.
Hotels have to be built.
Restaurants. Roads. Cruise terminals. Souvenir shops. Tourist buses.
And suddenly, the place we came to experience gradually becomes organised around those of us who have come to experience it.
Researchers use the term “overtourism” to describe problems that arise when visitor numbers become so large that they place significant pressure on local communities, the environment and the visitor experience itself.
Research on cruise destinations points to exactly this tension: the economic benefits need to be considered alongside the social and environmental consequences for the places receiving the tourists.
Cruising makes this particularly visible.
A hotel may release its guests into a city gradually throughout the day. A cruise ship can open its doors and send several thousand people ashore at roughly the same time.
Then the next ship arrives. And perhaps another one after that.
But we should also be careful not to romanticise the time before mass tourism
It is easy to say that everything was better before.
There were fewer tourists. Small hotels. Quiet beaches. “Authentic” local communities. But who could actually afford to experience them?
Mass tourism has given millions of people the opportunity to see places they might otherwise never have visited.
It has created jobs. Income. Infrastructure. And the opportunity to encounter people, languages and cultures far beyond our own small part of the world.
So the problem is not that many people travel. And I do not think the solution should be to make foreign travel a privilege for the wealthy again.
The more interesting question is this:
What happens when volume itself becomes the business model?
Because then the system needs scale.
The plane should be full. The hotel should be full. The ship should be full. The restaurants should be full. The buses should be full.
And then we tourists discover that we spend a considerable part of our holiday being annoyed by all the other tourists who bought exactly the same holiday as we did.
There is something rather funny about that. We want travel to be available to everyone. Just preferably not while we ourselves are there.
Perhaps this is what I was reacting to
I think this is why the cruise made such a strong impression on me.
Not because it was badly organised. Almost the opposite. It was because it was so extraordinarily well organised.
Several thousand people could sleep, eat, be entertained and transported from one country to another for twelve days.
- My cabin was cleaned twice a day.
- The theatre performances started when they were supposed to.
- Dinner arrived.
- The buses were waiting.
- The system worked.
And yet I could still feel more exhausted than free. Because efficiency and freedom are not necessarily the same thing. holidays are produced for very large numbers of people at the same time, chance has to be reduced.
And chance may be exactly one of the things I love most about travelling.
The street I was never supposed to walk down.
The café I happened to discover.
The person I unexpectedly started talking to.
A day that changes direction because something else suddenly seems more interesting.
That is much harder to mass-produce.
What does mass tourism tell us about ourselves?
- We want low prices.
- We want security.
- We want comfort.
- We want to see the world.
- We would rather not have to organise too much ourselves.
- We want to know what everything will cost.
- We want to be sure that someone will help us if something goes wrong.
And ideally, we want all of those things at the same time.
That gives us systems. It is not necessarily because someone decided that tourism should become impersonal.
Perhaps it is simply the result of what we ourselves have asked for. When millions of people want access to the world, someone has to find a way to organise millions of people. And perhaps that is what I discovered on Costa Diadema.
I thought I was going to explore cruising.
Instead, I found myself exploring mass tourism.
And perhaps ourselves as well. Because mass tourism is not simply something the travel companies invented.
We helped create it.
We want cheap flights, ready-made packages, security, accessibility and an endless supply of new experiences.
The industry responded. With aeroplanes. Hotels. Charter buses. Apps. Cruise ships. And an increasingly efficient machine that makes it possible for enormous numbers of people to be tourists at the same time.
- It is impressive.
- It is democratic.
- It is commercial.
- It can be wonderful.
And sometimes it can become far too much.
Perhaps that is why I still like the expression I came up with out there at sea.
Mass tourism?
Yes.
But sometimes it feels much more like assembly-line tourism.