giantcruiseliners actually constitute a double industry they don’t only fill a giant niche in tourism but in ship building Then there are the port related activities and onboard services to feed and hire for The savings of scale in these colossal fun palaces make a cruise more affordable to more people too One of the downsides however is that if one of these giants needs rescuing it’s a giant problem The italian Costa Concordia has a passenger capacity of three thousand two hundred at maximum occupancy it needs one thousand one hundred crew and onboard staff it would take nine or ten 747 jumbo jets to carry this many people It’s nearly three hundred meters long and forty meters wide and rises nearly the same height above the waterline The cruise ships are descended from the ocean liners that used to carry people between continents for some one hundred years until air travel overtook them The competition sent almost the whole liner species to the scrap yard than it became possible put such a range of comfort and entertainment on cruises that they became easier for more people to afford as an attractive alternative to a land based package holiday since 1980 the cruise market has increased at nearly twice the rate of tourism as a whole over time it grew so that budgets for traveling the seas in the lap of luxury did not need to be quite so extravagant for the business the more the merrier while the UK is driving forward with the as the second biggest source market behind the United States and of course the population of North America is five times ours The next in Europe is germany with about seven hundred thousand passengers followed by Italy and spain and then France but there’s a huge potential to develop cruises and not only in the UK but in Europe as a whole Europe passed the five million passenger mark on cruises in 2010 of course to keep a lot of people happy in different languages is a challenge Twenty nationalities made up the crew of the concordia and half of them struggled with English when the cruising Tower of babel hit a rock this added to the confusion
