No soy marinero

I live in a desert, and cruise ships just don’t appeal much to me, so this has been rather academic, but there was a discussion on one of the tourism boards a couple of days ago about the five dollar per head landing tax charged cruise ship passengers by various Mexican ports.

I guess it is a fairly contentious issue, as Kent Patterson’s The Battle of Zihuatanejo on the Center for International Policy America’s Program site details.

I’ve never complained about the visitor’s visa fee – the twenty bucks or so that you pay for your tourist visa … somebody’s got to pick up the tab for the extra coppers, soldiers (and forensic examiners when we foreigners walk in front of taxis drunk off our asses) required when we enter the country. And, charging a higher one-day fee for day trippers doesn’t sound all that outrageous to me. Besides, I live in the desert and the only cruise I was ever on was across the Gulf of Newfoundland… not exactly a tropical voyage. As Patterson notes about the once hippy-hideout at Zijua, the cruise ships create some extra costs other tourists don’t rack up:

infrastructure outlays for piers, terminals, and roads, the government has to shell out for salaries for soldiers, marines, local police, and security personnel to comply with post 9-11 anti-terrorist regulations.

Five bucks a head seems perfectly reasonable to me, but the Thorntree Message Board quotes several articles suggesting this will hurt the industry, and – more ominiously – opens the door to higher fees in the future. How much the cruise ship passengers bring in to the economy (as opposed to other tourists) is questionable:

Economically, the significance of the cruise ship industry is very small in Zihuatanejo. While providing some jobs, the money typically goes to select sectors: day-tour companies, taxis, dolphin swimming tanks, industry-certified stores, some restaurants, and the curio sellers near the municipal pier.

The Guerrero State Tourism Ministry reports that $1.763 billion of tourist dollars flowed through Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo during 2006. According to a report in El Sur, spending by 76,500 cruise ship passengers and 8,500 crew members, together with docking fees and taxes, netted about $7 million, or less than 0.5% of the resort’s overall tourist income. Based on the official numbers, even tripling the number of cruise ships docking in Zihuatanejo would bring the percentage of local tourist income earned by the industry to only about 1.5% of total tourist dollars. What’s more, the money stream only trickles during cruise ship season—between the months of October and May.

Leaving behind $60-75 on average, cruise ship passengers spend far less money in Zihuatanejo than other tourists. If cruise passengers take advantage of the federal government’s offer to refund sales taxes upon departure, the wider economic benefit of this type of tourism to Mexico becomes even more questionable.

Patterson’s article goes on to talk about the social and political fallout, but I’ve got a simpler question – what about the sewage? Wherever it is these tour boats empty their bilge, it can’t enhance the tourist experience of coming to “pristine” waters… and it seems reasonable to pay to keep pristine bays clean.  That takes money, and I’m not sure the fees are at all unreasonable.  Even if a tour boat stops at three or four Mexican ports, it doesn’t add all that much to the overhead of the cruise cost, and could easily be built into the tour costs.  What is the overhead on a cruise ship tour anyway?