ABSTRACT
Polar cruising at one time was limited to a handful of small expedition-type cruise ships – ships with capacity for 100 passengers or less. However, today it is not only these small intimate ships that visit polar regions. Increasingly, mainstream cruise lines, with ships accommodating 3000 or more passengers, are arriving. As a result, the number of visitors has increased dramatically, from a couple of hundred visiting Antarctica in 1969 to more than 45,000 tourists and 28,000 crew and staff in 2007/2008 (IAATO, 2008; Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2009). In 2007/2008 53 ships sailed to Antarctica, accounting for more than 300 voyages (Ganesh, 2009). According to a 2007 United Nations report, the number of tourists going ashore in Antarctica increased 757 per cent in just ten years (Berglund, 2007).
