Local Caribbean economies say they’ve been fooled by cruise industries’ empty promises
Skift Take
Passengers aren’t buying hand-made trinkets and local cuisine as towns were led to believe, but funneling the money back into the cruise companies via excursions and on-ship purchases.
Tourists emerge by the hundreds from a towering, 16-deck megaship docked at the Caribbean's newest cruise port. They squint in the glare of the Jamaican sun, peer curiously at a gaggle of locals beyond a wrought-iron fence and then roar out of town on a procession of air-conditioned tour buses.
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="350"] The residents of Falmouth, Jamaica believe they were deceived about the economic benefits that would come from Royal Caribbean’s $22 million port. Photo by Nathan Mac.[/caption]
Few stop to buy T-shirts, wooden figurines or beach towels from the dozens of merchants lining the road outside the fence, or visit the colonial-era buildings that dot the town. Not many even venture beyond the terminal's gates, unless it's in one of the buses that whisk them past increasingly disgruntled vendors and taxi drivers.
That's not the way townspeople in the old Jamaican sugar port of Falmouth were told it would be.
Jamaica's port authority and Royal
