By Alessandro Santi, Welcome Ashore Italy Ambassador

If we want an honest conversation about cruise tourism, I believe we must look past the ships and the passenger counts and take a broader view and asses the data of what happens when guests visit a destination. The new CLIA study on Civitavecchia gives us a good chance to do just that.

The headline figures are striking. Cruise activity linked to the port generates €1.5 billion in economic output across Lazio, adds €714 million to regional GDP and supports nearly 11,000 jobs. In 2024 alone, direct spending reached €1 billion.

But as I’ve said before, numbers only matter once we understand the people and communities behind them.

What interests me most is what happens beyond the port of Civitavecchia itself. More than half of turnaround passengers (54%) spend at least one night in Rome, staying an average of 3.3 nights, and another 36% overnight elsewhere in Italy. Passengers book hotels, eat in restaurants, take taxis and trains, shop in local stores and wander through our cities. The benefits spread well beyond the quayside.

Civitavecchia is very much part of that story too. Passenger and crew spending in the city reached €158 million, supporting nearly 2,000 jobs. For a city with a population of just 50,000 people, you can see just how critical the cruise industry is to its ongoing success. For the people of Civitavecchia these numbers mean customers coming through the door and jobs tied to a port that has become one of the Mediterranean’s most important cruise gateways.

How this activity is managed matters just as much. The study points to a long, fairly well-spread cruise season, with traffic split almost evenly between transit and turnaround guests. I’ve argued for some time that better distribution of cruise tourism should be central to Italy’s approach. When tourism can be planned, we can ease pressure on destinations while steering the economic benefits toward the communities that need them.

There will always be legitimate questions about how cruise tourism develops, and we shouldn’t shy away from them. But those conversations should begin with evidence and with the experiences of the people who live and work in our port communities. The new data provides critical evidence of the key role cruise tourism plays in not only the success of Civitavecchia but the wider Lazio region.

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