I was holidaying in Split, Croatia when the MS Queen Elizabeth [1] docked and thousands of people descended onto the city from it.
The quiet city became absolutely packed with tour groups from the ship, completely ruined the atmosphere.
I guess the cruise tourists do bring in quite a bit of money from eating in the restaurants, buying souvenirs etc, so not that much of a negative for the locals.
Unlike with cloud computing where you can spin up more servers to meet demand, you can't just spin up more city, more streets, more restaurants, more sights, more everything at the drop of a hat when demand spikes. I wonder how much of that traffic spike from a big cruise ship the city is actually able to capture.
If the city was built for peak demand, maybe, but then you'd have to maintain all the infrastructure when the tourists aren't there. So unless you have a new cruise ship every day ...
It's a hard problem. I don't think it's solvable. I'm in Venice right now and the difference between 1pm when it's jam packed with tourists and a total hellhole on earth, and a nice 7am run when it's empty and gorgeous ... yeah it does not even begin to compare. These old cities just weren't built for the kind of foot traffic they get these days as tourist destinations.
In the case of Venice often you just to avoid the streets that connect turistic POIs. Take a parallel calle 50 metres on the right or left and suddenly you are in a oasis with few tourists and peaceful silence.
"Locals" aren't a homogenous group. The city budget does benefit, and so do people working in businesses serving tourists directly - restaurants, gift shops, hotels, ticket offices, etc. Everyone else hates it. Tourism, especially of intermittent kind, disrupts regular life of regular people.
Meanwhile, no word from the locals who are living their life catering to those tourists.
Did you ask the locals what they thought of it? Their city isn't your private quiet getaway. Maybe they wanted the ship there. Or maybe they didn't. But that is their choice and their local government is free to prevent the ship from docking if that's the kind of policy they want to institute.
Aren't most cruise ship full board?
Plus you seem to suggest that visitor numbers are very lumpy which would make it very difficult to size the local restaurant industry. If average summer visitors are 10000, then the QE2 dumps out 20000 visitors for 2 days out of the month, do you size yourself to accommodate 10000 visitors? 30000?
Source: Worked in pubs that hosted coach parties, there was a massive variation in spend from coach to coach.
I suspect there's a lot of cultural and generational norms wrapped up in that though. A ship full of Swedes may prefer to return to the boat to eat, a ship full of Spaniards may all want 3 course meals on land, that just makes it harder for the host city to predict demand.
So at least for this company most people did not incur food costs on board for lunch (non the less having paid for it with the package deal).