Oral Presentation The Institute of Australian Geographers Conference 2023

Tourist or Expeditioner? Traveller Identities among Antarctic Cruise-Ship Passengers (18426)

Elizabeth Leane 1 , Anne Hardy 1 , Can Seng Ooi 1 , Hanne EF Nielsen 1 , Carolyn Philpott 1 , Katie Marx 1
  1. University of Tasmania, Hobart, TASMANIA, Australia

The “expedition cruise” is a label often used to describe a form of cruise-ship tourism involving smaller ships, educational experiences, and environmental and/or cultural interpretation (Walker and Moscardo 2006). In an Antarctic context, the term has an added meaning, referring to those vessels with 500 or fewer passengers, which can make landings (IAATO 2022). Only about two thirds of Antarctic cruises are officially considered to be “expedition style,” the remainder being larger “cruise-only” options (IAATO 2023).

The label “expedition” interpolates cruise-ship passengers in particular ways  - ways that echo the well-known traveller/tourist distinction. The “expedition imaginary,” according to Lesham and Pinkerton (2019), invokes “the idea of travelling into the unknown, into dangerous places.”  Thus passengers on expedition-style cruises are encouraged to understand themselves as “not merely sightseers but intrepid travellers” – which also endows their journeys with a sense of credibility and seriousness (Nuttall, 2010). Antarctic place-identity is premised on isolation, extremity and inaccessibility, and constructing tourists as expeditioners allows this identity to remain intact, even while tourist numbers are increasing rapidly.

Tensions exist, however, between the sense of adventure and purpose associated with an “expedition,” and the highly curated nature of cruise-ship travel. Operators must work hard to create the expedition experience, through their educational and philanthropic activities, citizen science projects, support for professional researchers, and promotion of tourists as “Antarctic ambassadors”. However, some commentators critique these efforts as a means to “assuage customers’ guilt about vacationing in an ecologically fragile place” (Blacker et al 2021).

In this paper, we draw on around interviews with passengers on “expedition-style” cruise ships over the 2022-23 season to examine the implications of the expeditioner/tourist binary. We ask how (if at all) “expeditioner” identity impacts on the tourist experience, and what the possible positive and negative consequences of this construction might be.

  1. Blacker, Sarah, Aya H Kimura, and Abby Kinchy (2021). “When Citizen Science is Public Relations.” Social Studies of Science 51.5: 780 -796.
  2. IAATO (International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators) (2022). “IAATO Overview of Antarctic Tourism.” Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting 17 (Berlin). IP042.
  3. IAATO (2023). “Vessel Directory.” Available at iaato.org/who-we-are/vessel-directory/.
  4. Lesham, Noah, and Alasdair Pinkerton (2019). “Rethinking Expeditions: On Critical Expeditionary Practice,” Progress in Human Geography 43.3 (2019): 496-514.
  5. Nuttall, Mark. “Narratives of History, Environment and Global Change: Expeditioner-tourists in Antarctica,” in Tourism and Change in the Polar Regions, ed. Michael Hall and Jarkko Saarinen. London: Routledge, 2010. 204-214
  6. Walker, Kaye, and Gianna Moscardo. “The Impact of Interpretation on Passengers of Expedition Cruises.” In Cruise-Ship Tourism. Ed. RK Dowling. Wallingford: CABI, 2006. 105-114.