Knowledge-Based Systems 70 (2014) 128–136

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Knowledge-Based Systems
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/knosys

ClustOfVar and the segmentation of cruise passengers from mixed data:

Some managerial implications
Juan Gabriel Brida a, Vincenzo Fasone b, Raffaele Scuderi b,⇑, Sandra Zapata-Aguirre b
a
School of Economics and Management and TOMTE, Competence Center in Tourism Management and Tourism Economics, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza Università 1,
I-39100 Bolzano, Italy
b
University of Enna ‘‘Kore’’, Cittadella Universitaria, 94100 Enna, Italy

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Market segmentation comprises a variety of measurement methodologies that are used to support
Received 23 September 2013 management, marketing and promotional policies in tourism destinations. This study applies ClustOfVar,
Received in revised form 5 May 2014 a relatively recent algorithm for cluster analysis from mixed variables. The technique finds groups of
Accepted 11 June 2014
variables by using a homogeneity criterion based on the sum of correlation ratios for qualitative variables,
Available online 27 June 2014
and squared correlations for quantitative variables. Then principal components from each cluster of
variables are extracted in order to segment cruise passengers. CART analysis is finally used for the sake
Keywords:
of finding the variables that drove the formation of the clusters. All the analysis is based on an official
ClustOfVar
Cruise tourism
survey of tourists who disembarked in Uruguayan ports. The analysis identified five clusters, both for
Mixed data variables and cruise passengers. Findings highlight the importance of the enjoyment of the contact with
Market segmentation local people for the economic impact, as well as the important role of age and gender related variables.
Uruguay Managerial implications are also discussed.
Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
With a remarkable growth in the last decades, cruise industry
has become one of the most dynamic and growing segments of
the travel and tourism industry [28]. This increase has occurred
since 1990 with an average annual passenger growth rate of 7.4%
[20]. The cruise industry has responded to the worldwide ports
growth with a rapid increase in the world’s cruise fleet, the crea-
tion of appealing itineraries that reflect the interests of today’s
travellers and the ability of cruise ships to visit new and exotic
locations [17]. Recent numbers reported by the FCCA [20], an
organization that represents member lines operating more than
100 vessels in Floridian, Caribbean and Latin American waters,
announced that 17 million passengers chose to cruise in 2012.
Thus, the industry will be well on the way to maturity [36,43].
In this context, South American markets, together with the
Mediterranean areas (with an annual growth rate of about 10%)
are also increasing their shares. They belonged to the top world
destinations in 2012 [17]. The country of Uruguay is in line with
this trend. It is a small country located in southern South America,
⇑ Corresponding author. Tel. +39 (0)935 536380; fax: +39 (0)935 536971.
E-mail addresses: juangabriel.brida@unibz.it (J.G. Brida), vincenzo.fasone@
unikore.it (V. Fasone), raffaele.scuderi@unikore.it (R. Scuderi), sandra.zapataaguirre@
unikore.it (S. Zapata-Aguirre).
bordering the South Atlantic Ocean, between Argentina and Brazil.
With two main ports Montevideo and Punta del Este, the country
has experienced a significant increase in the number of vessels,
as well in the number of disembarking cruise passengers. Accord-
ing to the data of the Ministry of Tourism and Sports of Uruguay
[34], during the 2011–2012 season 225 cruise ships arrived to
the country in the two ports of Montevideo (53%) and Punta del
Este (47%). This corresponds to an increase of 32% with respect
to the previous season, and it is also the most outstanding outcome
for both ports since 2004 [8]. From this context, a deeper under-
standing of the main characteristics of the cruisers disembarking
in the two ports could be an important feature in order to improve
the positive impact generated by this kind of activities.
The main focus of this paper is to find and analyse homogeneous
groups of cruise passengers who disembarked in Uruguayan ports.
This would allow to identify market segments, and suggest
managerial recommendations to destination managers and port
authorities. Indeed, market segmentation techniques comprise a
set of tools that are appropriate not only to segment markets and
identify target markets, but also for assisting a business analyst to
understand the relationship between destination and tourists [3].
Segmentation tools have been widely used in both industry and
academic research for the sake of gaining more insights into a wide
range of markets [40,19,21]. Their number has sensibly grown
[31,18], with each method presenting a peculiar view of the data

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2014.06.016
0950-7051/Ó 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
 J.G. Brida et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 70 (2014) 128–136
[30]. Hence, scholars have improved them in order to make them
less prone to error and misinterpretation [19]. The wide set of tech-
niques ranges from elementary percentiles and quartiles [35] to
more complex techniques such as factor analysis, principle compo-
nents and cluster analysis [3]. Nowadays, segmentation techniques
and methodologies have evolved in order to overcome a series of
limitations [3]. For instance, artificial neural networks (ANN) have
been proven as better method in yielding market segmentation
[26,33]. In many market segmentation researches, ANN based clus-
tering has been dominated by Self-Organizing Feature Map-SOFMs
or SOMs [26]. These neural networks have apparently primary
advantages over cluster analysis [3,6,24]. On the other hand, other
techniques have been developed in order to ‘refine’ classic ones [7].
However, for what concerns the studies of cruise passengers, only
few papers have applied these techniques for detecting and analys-
ing characteristics, behaviors and onshore experience of cruise pas-
sengers while visiting a port of call (see [2,9,12,10,42]).
This paper adopts a three-step multivariate market segmenta-
tion analysis, where clustering techniques are adopted for both
variables and units. The first step consists in the dimensionality
reduction of the original set of variables. This is a classic problem
in statistical analyses [32]. The reduction of the number of vari-
ables in a few latent dimensions has the twofold purpose of
imploding highly linearly dependent variables that might carry
too similar information, and at the same time of finding and inter-
preting common latent dimensions to such variables. Techniques
such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) or Multivariate Corre-
spondence Analysis (MCA), respectively for quantitative and qual-
itative variables, are usually applied in order to detect latent traits.
However these techniques are not able to handle mixed datasets.
In addition, they are built on the hypothesis that all variables share
a common ‘aspect’, i.e. come from a common ‘semantic’ group, and
they ‘only’ need to be imploded via a technique that would extract
latent variables. The latter components are found in such a way
that they are independent each other. Therefore they do exclude
the possible presence of links within the set of latent dimensions.
This paper faces these methodological issues through ClustOfVar
[16], a recent algorithm for clustering datasets where mixed vari-
ables are present. The methodology is based on PCAmix, a general-
ization of PCA and MCA.
After finding groups of variables, the second step is to segment
the cruisers via classic clustering algorithm. Specifically, Ward’s
[44] method and the comparison of different stopping rules were
adopted to determine groups of units. Finally, the third step con-
sists in using CART analysis [5], for the sake of estimating those
variables that significantly affect the partition in clusters of the ori-
ginal set.
The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 resumes the
adopted methodology. Section 3 presents the datasets. Section 4
shows the results and discusses them. Section 5 concludes.
2. Methodology
2.1. ClustOfVar
Redundancy of information is one of the problems that often
arises when clustering units. Strongly related variables can in fact
coexist, thus determining duplication of linear information that
may lead to misleading classifications of the units. Consistently,
the dimensionality of a dataset is usually reduced by techniques
such as the ones that are based on the extraction of latent vari-
ables. The most commonly used techniques are PCA for quantita-
tive variables, and MCA for qualitative variables. Nevertheless
these approaches consider all variables as being part of a common
set. For this reason, a commonly used practice is to first cluster
129
variables into groups. This way, each group will carry elements
with the most similar information.
Among the several methods that have been proposed for
dimensionality reduction, little attention has been paid to mixed
qualitative-quantitative datasets. To this end, ClustOfVar [16] is a
relatively recent algorithm for the statistical software R [37] to
handle mixed dataset. It finds group of variables by using a homo-
geneity criterion that is based on the sum of correlation ratios for
qualitative variables, and squared correlations for quantitative
variables. Identification of the number of clusters is made from
the analysis of aggregation levels and stability of the partitions
via bootstrapped mean-adjusted Rand index. Then from each clus-
ter a synthetic representative variable is extracted through PCAmix
[15,23]. The latter is a generalization of PCA and MCA that allows
handling of mixed datasets. The extracted new variable is the main
principal component of PCAmix applied within each group of
variables.
2.2. The algorithm
Consider two data matrices of v1 standardized quantitative and
v2 qualitative variables on n units, respectively named X ¼
  
x1 ; x2 ; . . . ; xi ; . . . ; xm1 and Z ¼ z1 ; z2 ; . . . ; zj ; . . . ; zv 2 . ClustOfVar
follows the usual steps of hierarchical agglomerative methods.
Therefore it starts by considering each of the v = v1 + v2 variables
as forming a cluster on its own.
1. Start with v partitions.
2. Aggregate the two clusters A and B with the smallest similarity
given by d(A, B) = H(A) + H(B)  H(A [ B). The homogeneity of
the k-th cluster of variables Ck e {C1, . . . , CK} is calculated from
P P  
HC k ¼ xi 2C k r 2 ðxi ; yk Þ þ zj 2C k g2 zj ; yk ¼ k1k . In the latter yk is
the first principal component of PCAmix applied to the stan-
dardized variables of Ck. The values of r2 and g2 are respectively
the squared correlation of xi and yk, and the correlation ratio of
zj and yk. The element k1k is the first eigenvalue of PCAmix
applied to Ck. Consider a partition PK of the initial set in K
P
clusters, and define HðPK Þ ¼ Kk¼1 HC k ¼ k11 þ k12 þ . . . þ k1K . The
algorithm operates in such a way that each partition in p – l
clusters maximizes H(PK) among all the possible partitions that
can be obtained by aggregating two of the clusters from the
previous partition in p  l + 1 clusters.
3. Stop when one single partition is obtained.
In order to evaluate the number K of the clusters to divide variables
into, both inspection of aggregation levels and a bootstrap method
to evaluate partitions’ stability are used. The latter is based on the
generation of b bootstrap samples of the N observations. On each
bootstrapped sample the steps of ClustOfVar are repeated. Mean-
adjusted [22] Rand indices are then computed from each of the b
samples.
Though relatively recent, the algorithm has been applied in dif-
ferent fields, as gene expression data [14], cardiac diseases [4], car
diagnosis [4], chemistry [45], detection of morphometric features
[29], farming and environment [25]. Chavent et al. [14] showed
also that the algorithm can outperform PCA for what concerns
dimension reduction.
2.3. Clustering of units and CART
The subsequent clustering of units in groups is based on the
extracted first components from each cluster of variables. It is
performed via the hierarchical agglomerative criterion of Ward
[44]. Different stopping rules were used in order to determine
the optimal number of clusters of cruisers. Specifically we
130 J.G. Brida et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 70 (2014) 128–136

compared the trace of the total-sample sum-of-squares and cross-
products matrix, and the indices of Scott, Marriot, Friedman and
Rubin, Calinski and Harabasz, Krzanowski and Lai – see [13].
The analysis of the key variables driving the aggregation of units
in clusters was conducted via the Classification And Regression
Tree (CART – [5]). CART is one of the most important and popular
nonparametric techniques in machine learning and data mining
[39]. Given a partition of units in groups and a set of variables, it
estimates hierarchical rules for the variables to be predictors of
the groups. Results are plotted through a tree structure, which dis-
plays graphically how variables rule the formation of clusters of
units. A main advantage is the easy-to-interpret representation of
the groups’ drivers, useful for marketing and policy indications.
The method operates through binary recursive partitioning. The
initial measurement space X, called ‘root node’ is split into two
descendent subsets, each one having a label that indicates which
variable and modality determined the splitting. The new subset
can be either itself a ‘parent node’ of other ‘nodes’ (‘recursivity’
of the technique), or a ‘terminal node’ (i.e., ‘leaf’) that corresponds
to a cluster of units. At every stage subsets are mutually exclusive
(generated ‘partitioning’). To build a tree, the main tasks involved
in this method are the following ones.
– Select a splitting criterion.
– Decide whether a node should be split further.
– Assign a cluster of units to each terminal node, according to the
majority vote criterion.
At each node, the split that maximizes the decrease in impurity
(i.e., heterogeneity of nodes obtained in the splitting) is chosen.
This can be based on measures such as Gini index, entropy,
misclassification error. The final tree is obtaining from ‘pruning’:
after determining a nested sequence of subtrees, least important
splits are recursively snipped off, based on the complexity
parameter. The latter is found via classic cross-validation criteria.
Among the various available estimation methods, we used the ones
implemented in the package rpart of the software R [41].
3. Dataset and variables
This study is based on a survey conducted by the Uruguayan
Ministry of Tourism (MINTURD) during the 2011–2012 cruise sea-
son. Original dataset consisted of 3537 records, which reduced to
2585 due to missing data. Data were collected at the two ports
of call of Montevideo and Punta del Este. The sampling strategy
used a two-step stratified approach. In a first phase cruise vessels
were selected randomly, from a list of the ships expected to arrive
during the season, through a systematic sampling. In the second
stage, cruise passengers from travel groups were chosen to ensure
equiprobability. Trained interviewers approached cruise passen-
gers prior to return to the ship.
Table 1 reports the list of variables that are used in this paper
together with the labels that are used in our analysis. They include
the following items.
– Socio-demographic. This category includes classic variables
such as gender, age and place of residence. Occupation was
considered also as proxy of wealth levels, since information
about income was not available. In addition, we considered
the number of past visits to Uruguay. Repeat visit is a
widespread phenomenon in the country, as many tourists from
neighbor countries use to return because they own second

Table 1
Variables: description of labels and descriptive statistics.

Qualitative variables Quantitative variables

Label Description % Label Description Mean
Gender Expenditure, per capita
gender.m Male 37.10 exp.tot.pc Total 139.75
gender.f Female 62.90 exp.fb.pc Food & beverage 31.45
Age exp.shop.pc Shopping 95.93
age.1935 19–35 5.69 exp.tour.pc Tour 4.75
age.3664 36–64 78.26 exp.trans.pc Transportations 1.08
age.65m >64 16.05 exp.oth.pc Other 4.76
Country of residence Travel party
res.bra Brazil 41.97 group.tot Size 2.43
res.arg Argentina 36.63 Nm.less15.p % males < 15 yrs 2.38
res.oam America, other 11.80 Nf.less15.p % females < 15 yrs 2.42
res.eur Europe 7.74 Nm.1529.p % males 15–29 yrs 3.31
res.oth Other 1.86 Nf.1529.p % females 15–29 yrs 4.89
Loyalty Nm.3064.p % males 30–64 yrs 27.79
times.1 First 65.57 Nf.3064.p % females 30–64 yrs 42.94
times.23 Second or third 20.08 Nm.65more.p % males > 64 yrs 5.57
times.m3 Fourth or more 14.35 Nf.65more.p % females > 64 yrs 10.69
Occupation
occ.rethou Retired, housewife 26.00
occ.own Entrepreneur or similar 13.97
occ.pro Professional or similar 33.66
occ.emp Employee or similar 12.34
occ.cre Ship’s crew 7.00
occ.oth Other 7.04
Port of call
port.mon Montevideo 43.60
port.pde Punta del Este 56.40
Satisfaction
like.bui Liked buildings 25.79
like.lan Liked landscape 7.30
like.hyg Liked hygiene 9.01
like.peo Liked people 31.26
like.tra Liked tranquillity 4.87
like.foo Liked food 4.37
 J.G. Brida et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 70 (2014) 128–136
Fig. 1. ClustOfVar: dendrogram.
homes, particularly in Punta del Este [11]. In addition, notable
flows of repeaters come from Argentina, because of the
closeness of its capital city to Montevideo, and the related high
frequency of land and maritime means of transportations [1].
However, as also descriptive statistics of Table 1 point out, the
percentage of cruise passengers who already visited the
country, also through other forms of tourism, is low.
– Trip-related. This category comprises travel party information
(size and composition by age and gender), port of call where
the ship stopped, per capita expenditure in USD (total, and
for separate items such as food & beverage, shopping, tour,
transportations, other).
– Psychographic. The surveyed psychographic variables reported
whether the tourist enjoyed particular aspects of the visit,
namely buildings, landscape, hygiene, people, tranquillity, food
and beverage, other.
Descriptive statistics from Table 1 highlight that the sample
was composed mainly by women (62.9%), and a large percentage
of respondents were in the middle class age (36–64, 78.26%). The
majority of passengers were resident in the two neighbor countries
(Brazil, 41.97%, and Argentina, 36.63%), and were mainly first time
Fig. 2. ClustOfVar: aggregation levels.
131
visitors (65.57%). They disembarked to Montevideo in a bit lower
percentage (43.6%) than in Punta del Este (56.4%). The majority
of them were professionals (33.66%), retired or housewives (26%)
and entrepreneurs (13.97%). The main satisfaction-related aspect
was local people (31.26%), followed by buildings and architectures
of the visited places (25.79%) and hygiene (9.01%). The average vis-
itor spent USD 139.75, with shopping (USD 95.93) and food and
beverage (USD 31.45) being the main items in terms of average
expenditure. Travel parties were composed on average by more
than two passengers (2.43), and consistently with the information
about age, the highest average shares were of women in the class
age 30–64 (42.94%), but also men (27.79%) in the same age bracket.
4. Results and discussion
4.1. Clusters of variables
Fig. 1 reports the dendrogram for the clustering of variables.
Aggregation distances (Fig. 2) can be examined in order to choose
Fig. 3. ClustOfVar: stability of the partitions, mean adjusted Rand index from
bootstrap.
132 J.G. Brida et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 70 (2014) 128–136

for quantitative ones. In addition, we also reported correlation

Fig. 4. ClustOfVar: boxplots of mean adjusted Rand index from bootstrap.
the cutting threshold of the dendrogram to determine groups. It
emerges that three and five are two candidate numbers. This is
confirmed by the bootstrapped mean-adjusted Rand criterion
reported by Fig. 3, where however a slightly higher value is
reported for K = 5. The higher stability of the five-partition solution
emerges also from the boxplots of Fig. 4, which report a lower dis-
persion and a higher median value for that K.
Table 2 displays the composition of each cluster of variables
(VClust), together with factor loadings. The latter correspond to
correlation ratio for qualitative variables, and squared correlation
between the first principal component of each VClust and original
quantitative and dummy variables.
The examination of the clusters of variables suggests that
VClust 1 refers to economic impact. It aggregates all expenditure
items, as well as the enjoyment for local people. All reported vari-
ables are positively related with the extracted component. Indeed
this is an interesting indication about the behavior of disembarking
cruise tourists, inasmuch as their economic impact in all the items
appears to have something in common with the enjoyment of per-
sonal characteristics of locals. This also suggests that economic
impact is not correlated to a segment of tourists with other specific
characteristics, which turns out to be quite a strong indication to
market operators.
Age is the other important element for the definition of cruisers’
characteristics in two VClust. VClust 3 collects variables of age and
group composition that are related to teenagers and young people.
In addition also ‘other’ occupations are present. The latter rein-
forces such age-related VClust, since students compose about
30% of this category. Another age-related set of variables is VClust
5, which can be attributed to the segment of elderly travellers
(65 years or more). This is confirmed by group composition, the
negative correlation with the middle-aged segment (36–64), and
the positive one with the occupation items of retired and house-
hold. Consistently, the cluster reports other occupations in a nega-
tive relationship with the extracted first component (professionals,
entrepreneurs, employees).
VClust 4 instead reports gender-related characteristics, where
specifically a direct correlation with females is found, together
with an inverse correlation with the percentage of males aged
30–64 in the travel party.
VClust 2 is the group that collects the highest number of vari-
ables. It is made of people from Argentina and disembarking at
Punta del Este. They did not visit Uruguay for the first time and
are not part of the crew of the ship. Group size has also a positive

Table 2
ClustOfVar: clusters of variables composition, squared loadings, correlation between the first principal component from PCAmix and each quantitative or dummy variable.

Variable Squared loading Corr. Variable Squared loading Corr.

VClust 1 VClust 3
Economic impact Young travellers, also in groups
exp.tot.pc 0.952529442 0.976 age.1935 0.8424915 0.918
exp.shop.pc 0.756128525 0.870 Nf.1529.p 0.5552205 0.745
exp.fb.pc 0.208906669 0.457 Nm.1529.p 0.4332971 0.658
exp.tour.pc 0.030133165 0.174 occ.oth 0.1498959 0.387
exp.trans.pc 0.021897322 0.148 VClust 4
exp.oth.pc 0.006675104 0.082 Women, not travelling with middle-aged men
like.peo 0.000185593 0.014 gender.f 0.9343701 0.967
VClust 2 gender.m 0.9343701 0.967
Loyal Argentineans at Punta del Este Nm.3064.p 0.4313739 0.657
port.mon 0.739120566 0.860 VClust 5
port.pde 0.739120566 0.860 Elderly travellers, also in groups
res.arg 0.527357386 0.726 age.65m 0.88127067 0.939
times.1 0.13029228 0.361 age.3664 0.76363258 0.874
res.oam 0.111062122 0.333 Nf.65more.p 0.67947608 0.824
res.eur 0.094914868 0.308 Nm.65more.p 0.52230948 0.723
occ.cre 0.076499885 0.277 occ.rethou 0.44769825 0.669
res.bra 0.075708253 0.275 Nf.3064.p 0.40892876 0.639
like.foo 0.072251661 0.269 occ.pro 0.10415314 0.323
times.23 0.067257714 0.259 occ.own 0.03329502 0.182
group.tot 0.054516384 0.233 occ.emp 0.02862077 0.169
like.bui 0.042374137 0.206
times.m3 0.037197127 0.193
res.oth 0.032328529 0.180
Nm.less15.p 0.023459383 0.153
Nf.less15.p 0.019858367 0.141
like.hyg 0.018630443 0.136
like.lan 0.013853278 0.118
like.tra 0.002315793 0.048
 J.G. Brida et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 70 (2014) 128–136 133

Fig. 5. Clusters of cruise passengers from Ward algorithm: dendrogram.

Fig. 6. CART analysis: decision tree for the five clusters of cruise passengers, original variables. The root reports the number of units belonging to each cluster. The second row
of rectangular boxes report the percentage of units belonging to each cluster that enter a given step, respectively for clusters 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

correlation, as well as the percentage of the youngest group mem-
bers (<15 years) of both genders, which may indicate also the pres-
ence of families. The first principal component within the cluster is
positively related to the enjoyment of hygiene and tranquillity.
Consistently with some of these characteristics, negative correla-
tion occurs with disembarking in Montevideo, first time visiting
and living in other places than Argentina. The first principal com-
ponent shows also negative correlation with those who indicated
satisfaction with more material elements such as food, buildings
and landscape.
4.2. Clusters of units analysis via CART
The five principal components of each VClust were used to
obtain the clusters of units of Fig. 5. Five out of eight of the stop-
ping rules mentioned in Section 2.3 suggested a number of five
partitions of units. The description of their main discriminating
variables via CART adopts two points of view. The first one illus-
trates how all ‘raw’ variables used for the ClustOfVar analysis
(Table 1) affected the formation of the five clusters of units
(Fig. 6). The second one (Fig. 7) shows instead how the synthesis
134 J.G. Brida et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 70 (2014) 128–136
Fig. 7. CART analysis: decision tree for the five clusters of cruise passengers, first extracted components from clusters of variables. The root reports the number of units
belonging to each cluster. The second row of rectangular boxes report the percentage of units belonging to each cluster that enter a given step, respectively for clusters 1, 2, 3,
4 and 5.
of ClustOfVar, i.e. the first principal components of each VClust,
ruled the aggregation in the same five clusters of units.
Fig. 6 shows that, within the broader set of variables used for
forming the clusters (see Table 1), only age, gender, port of disem-
barking and total expenditure concur in discriminating the groups.
Age is the first and most important variable that enters the binary
splitting process of the tree. It divides Cluster 4 (right branch) from
the remainder. This group reports the age of cruisers of 65 and
more as most distinctive feature. The complementary subset (left
branch of the tree) is characterized by cruisers of younger age.
For these units, the port of call is a very important further discrim-
inating variable. The right sub-branch comprises those who disem-
barked in Montevideo, and it splits further in two parts where age
acts again as a discriminating factor. Middle-aged cruisers (36–64)
are part of almost the totality of Cluster 5 (91.7%), whereas tourists
of other ages enter 48.9% of Cluster 3. For those who instead disem-
barked in Montevideo, gender concurs to discriminate further
between men, who enter 89.3% of Cluster 1, and women, who
are further discriminated according to their age. In this further
step, again Cluster 3 results to be composed by non-middle aged
tourists, this time for its 35.1%, whereas cruisers aged between
36 and 64 take another step of splitting. The latter involves total
expenditure levels and generates 91.3% of Cluster 2 and 4.7% of
Cluster 5, where high spenders affect such small portion of the
latter.
The interpretation of clusters’ main discriminating variables is
less direct if we take into account the latent dimensions that syn-
thesize each VClust – Fig. 7. Of course, the higher complexity of this
second tree structure might be due to the fact that the latent
dimensions of VClust express concepts that are themselves more
complex than the single indicators of Fig. 6. Here VClust 2, that is
the highly related variable to Argentineans disembarking at Punta
del Este, is the most important discriminating feature. Those that
present the lowest values of this variable are part of the right side
branch, which is split further by age-related variables (VClust 5 for
elderly, and then VClust 3 for young travellers). Then what
reported for Fig. 6 appears again: elderly travellers enter 43.9% of
Cluster 4, whereas young ones are part of 42% of Cluster 3, and
middle aged enter 89.3% of Cluster 5. Cruisers in the left-side
branch generated by VClust 2, which is those that show a high
score for this variable, are further divided according to VClust 4
that reports a women-related dimension. Then, male cruisers are
further distinguished according to their economic impact (VClust
1) into a group entering 2.3% of Cluster 1 (high economic impact),
and another one of non-high impact being part of 93.5% of Cluster
1. Women instead are split for their age (VClust 5), with elder ones
being divided again into younger (part of 51.9% of Cluster 3) and
not (54.5% of Cluster 4). Younger women are split according to
their economic impact (VClust1) into Cluster 5 (only 5.9% of it)
and 97.9 of Cluster 2.
Overall, results of both the CART analyses highlighted the pri-
mary importance of variables such as age and port of disembark-
ing, and to a second extent of gender and expenditure. The latter
deserves peculiar attention. In both CART diagrams, the segment
of very high spenders is isolated. But if on one side the raw variable
in Fig. 6 regarded only 4.7% of Cluster 5, on the other side such ele-
ment percentage increased when dealing with a broader concept of
‘economic impact’ as measured by VClust 1 (2.3% plus 5.9%). It is
also interesting to note that the model does not apply any other
splitting rule within the subsample of the spenders with relatively
lower levels. This might confirm that, after isolating for very high
spenders, the economic impact of cruisers might be quite wide-
spread and somehow similar across the subsets.
5. Conclusions
Despite the remarkable growth of the cruise industry and its
great changes, studies on cruise passenger’s behavior while at port
are not common in the academic research. In this sense, the pres-
ent paper contributed both to the cruise industry literature, and to
provide some insights to destination stakeholders, who can use the
results as an input to design suitable managerial strategies and to
offer a pleasant and satisfactory visitation during the time ship
passengers are onshore.
In this work we adopted a three-step multivariate market seg-
mentation analysis. Given the classic problem in reducing dimen-
sionality we used ClustOfVar, a relatively recent algorithm for
the statistical software R that is able to handle qualitative-quanti-
tative datasets. There are few studies designed to handle mixed
datasets in the tourism field and, particularly to best of our knowl-
edge, in the cruise tourism analysis. Key findings reported the
 J.G. Brida et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 70 (2014) 128–136
importance of the cruiser onshore expenditure in general terms,
thus suggesting that cruise tourists find good shopping opportuni-
ties while at Uruguayan ports. In addition, economic impact in all
the items appears to have something in common with the enjoy-
ment of personal characteristics of local people. Thus, it would
be desirable to create a good atmosphere for cruisers while at port,
through positive experience derived from the interaction with
locals. With this regard, the synergic cooperation with local part-
ners may lead also to effects that go beyond the single cruise trip,
such as the increasing loyalty of customers [38], and the develop-
ment of local firms [27].
As to managerial implications from other findings, suggestions
regard the launch of targeted market strategies and campaigns
focusing on attracting passengers from nationalities different from
the Argentinean one. As results indicate, being resident in Argen-
tina is in the same group and positively correlated with loyalty
indicators. Promotion of cruise tourism can be a good strategy in
order to increase the volume of the segment of travellers who have
never visited the country.
In addition, variables such age and port of disembarking, and to
a lesser extent gender and economic impact, have shown to be the
main drivers for cluster formation. This is a further strong sugges-
tion towards the organization of specific on-site activities for dif-
ferently aged cruisers. Moreover, the specific features of each
place of disembarking should be highlighted while promoting the
activities at the port of call, and at the same time be an important
part of the experience of the tourist. Once more, all this reinforces
the idea of creating or strengthening the relationships with local
partners. For what concerns the economic impact, at Punta del Este
there has been a reduced number of tourists exhibiting very high
levels of spending, mainly women. But after isolating for these,
no further discriminating thresholds of expenditure or economic
impact were functional to identify segments of tourists. This might
suggest that the profitability of disembarking tourists could be
quite widespread within the great majority of them.
The used dataset comes from an official survey from the Uru-
guayan Ministry of Tourism (MINTURD), which reports a large
sample of cruisers. Of course, this is a strong point. However the
main limitation of this study is given by the used dataset itself.
Important variables such as income, and behaviors-related ones
while at the port are absent. In addition, the presence of psycho-
graphic variables is limited. For future researches, it would be of
great importance to include these key variables. This would allow
a better understanding of attitudes and behaviors that are crucial
for market operators and promoters of activities related to cruise
ship visit. Future research directions can consist in applying the
technique to other surveys of cruisers visiting other places and in
different times, in order to better define the tourists’ profile of this
growing segment in the tourism industry. More in general, the
combination of information from clusters of variables and of units
can support market segmentation and analysis in a wide variety of
business contexts.
Acknowledgements
This paper was supported by the Free University of Bozen-Bolz-
ano project ‘‘Tourism and Economic Growth: the Role of Transpor-
tations and Spatial Contiguity’’.
References
[1] A. Abbruzzo, J.G. Brida, R. Scuderi, Determinants of tourist expenditure as a
network: empirical findings from Uruguay, Tourism Manage. 43 (2014) 36–45.
[2] K. Andriotis, G. Agiomirgianakis, Cruise visitors’ experience in a Mediterranean
port of call, Int. J. Tourism Res. 12 (2010) 390–404.
[3] J. Bloom, Tourist market segmentation with linear and non-linear techniques,
Tourism Manage. 25 (2004) 723–733.
135
[4] H. Bouhamed, T. Lecroq, A. Rebaï, New filter method for categorical variables’
selection, Int. J. Comput. Sci. Issues 9 (2012) 1–10.
[5] L. Breiman, J.H. Friedman, R.A. Olshen, C.J. Stone, Classification and Regression
Trees, Wadsworth, Belmont, Calif, 1984.
[6] J.G. Brida, M. Disegna, L. Osti, Segmenting visitor of cultural events by
motivation: a sequential non-linear clustering analysis of Italian Christmas
Market visitors, Expert Syst. Appl. 39 (2012) 11349–11356.
[7] J.G. Brida, M. Disegna, R. Scuderi, Visitors of two types of museums: a
segmentation study, Expert Syst. Appl. 40 (2013) 2224–2232.
[8] J.G. Brida, V. Fasone, R. Scuderi, S. Zapata-Aguirre, Exploring the determinants
of cruise passengers’ expenditure while at ports of call in Uruguay, Tourism
Econ. (2013), http://dx.doi.org/10.5367/te.2013.0322 (online Fast Track
article).
[9] J.G. Brida, M. Pulina, E. Riaño, S. Zapata-Aguirre, Cruise passenger’s experience
embarking in a Caribbean Homeport, Ocean Coast. Manag. 55 (2012) 135–145.
[10] J.G. Brida, M. Pulina, E. Riaño, S. Zapata-Aguirre, Cruise passengers in a
homeport: a market analysis, Tourism Geographies: Int. J. Tourism Space Place
Environ. 15 (2013) 68–87.
[11] J.G. Brida, J. Pereyra, R. Scuderi, Repeat tourism in Uruguay: modelling
truncated distributions of count data, Qual. Quant. 48 (2014) 475–491.
[12] J.G. Brida, R. Scuderi, M.N. Seijas, Segmenting cruise passenger visiting
Uruguay: a Factor-Cluster Analysis, Int. J. Tourism Res. 16 (2014) 209–222.
[13] M. Charrad, N. Ghazzali, V. Boiteau, A. Niknafs, NbClust: An Examination of
Indices for Determining the Number of Clusters: NbClust Package. R package
version 1.4, 2013. <http://CRAN.R-project.org/package=NbClust>.
[14] M. Chavent, R. Genuer, V. Kuentz-Simonet, B. Liquet, J. Saracco, ClustOfVar: an
R package for dimension reduction via clustering of variables. Application in
Supervised Classification and Variable Selection in Gene Expressions Data.
Poster Presented at the Conference ‘Statistical Methods for (post)-Genomics
Data (SMPGD 2013)’, 2013. <http://www.math.u-bordeaux1.fr/~machaven/
wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/poster-SMPGD.pdf>.
[15] M. Chavent, V. Kuentz, B. Liquet, J. Saracco, ClustOfVar: an R package for the
clustering of variables, J. Stat. Softw. 50 (2012) 1–16.
[16] M. Chavent, V. Kuentz, J. Sarraco, Orthogonal rotation in PCAMIX, Adv. Data
Anal. Classif. 6 (2012) 131–146.
[17] CLIA-Cruise Lines International Association, 2012. Cruise Industry Update.
Retrieved from <http://www.cruising.org/sites/default/files/pressroom/
2012CruiseIndustryUpdateFinal.pdf> (accessed 27.03.13).
[18] S. Dolnicar, F. Leisch, Segmenting markets by bagged clustering, Australasian
Market. J. 12 (2004) 51–65.
[19] S. Dolnicar, S. Kaiser, K. Lazarevski, F. Leisch, Biclustering: overcoming data
dimensionality problems in market segmentation, J. Travel Res. 51 (2012) 41–
49.
[20] FCCA-Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association, 2012. Cruise Industry Overview.
Retrieved from <http://www.f-cca.com/downloads/2013-cruise-industry-
overview.pdf> (accesed 20.04.13).
[21] Y. Hayashi, M.H. Hsiehb, R. Setiono, Understanding consumer heterogeneity: a
business intelligence application of neural networks, Knowl.-Based Syst. 23
(2010) 856–863.
[22] L. Hubert, P. Arabie, Comparing partitions, J. Classif. (1985) 193–208.
[23] H.A.L. Kiers, Simple structure in Component Analysis Techniques for mixtures
of qualitative and quantitative variables, Psychometrika 56 (1991) 197–212.
[24] J. Kim, S. Wei, H. Ruys, Segmenting the market of Western Australia senior
tourists using artificial neural networks, Tourism Manage. 24 (2003) 25–34.
[25] V. Kuentz-Simonet, S. Lyser, J. Candau, P. Deuffic, M. Chavent, J. Saracco, Une
approche par classification de variables pour la typologie d’observations: le cas
d’une enquête agriculture et environnement, Journal de la Société Française de
Statistique 154 (2013) 37–63.
[26] R.J. Kuo, K. Akbaria, B. Subroto, Application of particle swarm optimization and
perceptual map to tourist market segmentation, Expert Syst. Appl. 39 (2012)
8726–8735.
[27] C. Lechner, M. Dowling, I. Welpe, Firm networks and firm development: the
role of the relational mix, J. Bus. Ventur. 21 (2006) 514–540.
[28] S. Lee, C. Ramdeen, Cruise ship itineraries and occupancy rates, Tourism
Manage. 34 (2013) 236–237.
[29] D. Legland, J. Beaugrand, Automated clustering of lignocellulosic fibres based
on morphometric features and using clustering of variables, Ind. Crops Prod.
45 (2013) 253–261.
[30] F. Leisch, A toolbox for K-centroids cluster analysis, Comput. Stat. Data Anal. 51
(2006) 526–544.
[31] S.H. Liao, P.H. Chu, P.Y. Hsiao, Data mining techniques and applications – a
decade review from 2000 to 2011, Expert Syst. Appl. 39 (2012) 11303–11311.
[32] K.V. Mardia, J.T. Kent, J.M. Bibby, Multivariate Analysis, Academic Press Inc.,
London, 1979.
[33] J.A. Mazanec, Classifying tourists into market segments: a neural network
approach, J. Travel Tourism Mark. 1 (1992) 39–59.
[34] MINTURD-Ministerio de Turismo y Deporte, 2012. Database Cruise Survey.
<http://www.turismo.gub.uy/estadisticas/item/385-bases-de-datos>
(accessed 15.04.13).
[35] C. Mok, T.J. Iverson, Expenditure-based segmentation: Taiwanese tourists to
Guam, Tourism Manage. 21 (2000) 299–305.
[36] T. Peisley, The cruise ship industry to the 21st century, Travel Tourism Analyst
2 (1995) 4–25, http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/rpm.2009.55.
[37] R Core Team, R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R
Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria, 2013. <http://www.R-
project.org/> (accessed 15.04.13).
136 J.G. Brida et al. / Knowledge-Based Systems 70 (2014) 128–136
[38] M. Rodríguez-Díaz, T.F. Espino-Rodríguez, A model of strategic evaluation of a
tourism destination based on internal and relational capabilities, J. Travel Res.
46 (2008) 368–380.
[39] L. Rutkowski, M. Jaworski, L. Pietruczuk, P. Duda, The CART decision tree for
mining data streams, Inf. Sci. 266 (2014) 1–15.
[40] G. Sánchez-Hernández, F. Chiclana, N. Agell, J.C. Aguado, Ranking and selection
of unsupervised learning marketing segmentation, Knowl.-Based Syst. 44
(2013) 20–33.
[41] T. Therneau, B. Atkinson, B. Ripley, rpart: Recursive Partitioning and
Regression Trees. R package version 4.1-5, 2014. <http://CRAN.R-project.org/
package=rpart>.
[42] B. Thurau, A. Carver, J. Mangun, C. Basman, G. Bauer, A market segmentation
analysis of cruise ship tourists visiting the Panama Canal Watershed:
opportunities for ecotourism development, J. Ecotourism 6 (2007) 1–18.
[43] UNWTO, Cruise Tourism, First ed. Current situation and Trends, ooMadrid,
2010.
[44] J.H. Ward, Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function, J. Am. Stat.
Assoc. 58 (1963) 236–244.
[45] M. Xie, F. Deng, X. Zhang, Y. Tian, P. Li, H. Zhai, MLRMPA: an R package of
multiple linear regression model population analysis based on a cluster
sampling technique for variable selection of high dimensional data, Chemom.
Intell. Lab. Syst. 132 (2014) 124–132.