There are cruises which are "just looking" but the ones which visit heavily touristic areas tend to stop and let passengers off. Also these ships are enormous, loud and polluting. I think most locals would prefer hotels which at least contribute to the economy.
Most tourists are not coming by cruise. They're Italians (train to Rome is cheap and takes three hours), Europeans (dirt cheap flights) and other airborne visitors. Since it's easy to get to, lots of people go to Rome and then do a day or a night in Venice.
Santorini is tiny. It's set up as a luxury island for couples (and it's beautiful, so you see why). I guess cruising there is cheaper than ferry and hotel.
Mallorca is somewhere in the middle. Relatively cheap to fly there, cheap to stay and cheap to eat. But again, not designed for a thousand person instantaneous load who thunder through, buy trinkets and leave.
Remember you get a bed, breakfast and dinner onboard so why waste money on land if you only have say six hours to visit? (unless the ship docks overnight)
I'm sure the host country has a say in this...they can receive cruises or not so the "dumping" might be a different thing for them. Like tourism cash. At least they decide for themselves, not us.
You're absolutely right that most locals would prefer hotels - the economic contributions alone answer for the externalities that the OP was concerned about.
Cruise ships unload hordes of tourists who are then shepherded through the commercial center of town for a couple of hours. You'd think that's a good thing. It's not.
They don't go to restaurants for a full meal, they don't visit venues or do any activities. It's literally drop 'n shop. Meanwhile, they crowd the streets, not to mention the surplus of garbage. Commercial activity changes to low quality souvenir shops and fast food.
Local economy earns very little, but the costs of having them are very much for the locals.
With traditional brick'n'mortar tourism the people who fleece the tourists make bank. Then the people who fleece the people who fleece the tourists take their cut. The landlord, the plumber, the garbage collection company, everything including even the municipal government basically charges what the market will bear in order to get their slice of the pie.
Cruise ships piss off everyone who isn't running a tourist trap, T-shirt shop or cafe because they handle all the supporting industry so the people who normally fleece the people who fleece the tourists don't get their cut because the tourists don't have to stay in a hotel, visit a liquor store, etc, etc. in order to visit the beaches, the cafe's the shops, etc. because the cruise ship handles that.
Right, so if the cruises weren't there they would look to increase that "capacity" to accommodate that demand - which would likely mean building giant hotels.
> I think most locals would prefer hotels which at least contribute to the economy.
The kind of person who wants a cruise would probably favour a resort-style hotel, so it would be the same thing in terms of not eating at local restaurants, crowding into the same places, and the like. Hotels provide some employment but not particularly high quality employment (it's mostly precarious minimum wage jobs, no?), and meanwhile their existence pushes up land/building prices. Hotels might pay direct taxes, but cruise ships can be made to do the same.
Resort style hotels tend to be sited elsewhere with space for pools and recreation, and people don't leave (or they do so on a couple of tour coaches a day). Though look at Oxford or Cambridge in summer to understand how busy "the odd coach" can make a city centre.
Cruise ships are also full of mostly low-paid, high-turnover jobs (often seasonal). Hotels confine people which means they then go and spend time (and money) in the city. They might go for an early breakfast, eat out, see some museums.
In an efficient market everything operates at capacity. That doesn't mean there's no ability to adjust. In the absence of the cruise ships there'd be more demand for hotels, driving up prices; land values would go up, pricing more of the locals out. Restaurants and homes would be converted into tourist accommodation. Pressure would mount to relax the building regulations - not around the unique tourist attractions, but in the backstreets where it could be argued that there wasn't such unique architectural merit. And most important of all, fewer people would get to see Venice.
