ACADEMIA Letters Hitting the reset button for post-COVID-19 cruise tourism: The case of Akaroa, Aotearoa New Zealand Michael Lück, Auckland University of Technology Sabrina Seeler Aleksander Radic Introduction Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020, cruise tourism was often hailed as the fastest- growing sector within the tourism industry (Radic, 2019). The Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), representing 55 cruise lines and 95% of the global cruise capacity, pre- dicted that 32 million passengers would take a cruise in 2020 (CLIA, 2019). With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns and global travel restrictions brought the travel indus- try to a standstill, meaning also that the phenomenal growth of the cruise industry has abruptly ground to a halt. Prior to the halt of cruises, the industry had come under fre for a plethora of negative impacts on the environment, host communities, and their own workforce (Mac- Neill & Wozniak, 2018; Jordan et al., 2020; Radic et al., 2020). In particular, many observers attributed the phenomenon of overtourism, for example, in Barcelona and Venice, at least in part to the cruise lines (Asero & Skonierczny, 2018; Ruiz-Guerra et al., 2019). While in the spotlight of the media, these popular cities were not the only places that experienced a heavy burden on the local communities due to the large infux of cruise passengers in pre COVID- 19 tourism. For example, the small Alaskan town of Skagway has a population of just over 1,000, but receives around 10,000 daily cruise passengers in the short summer cruise season each year (Urken, 2019). The tiny town of Akaroa on New Zealand’s South Island, popula- tion 625, has been similarly afected. Here, over 200,000 visitors and 81,000 crew arrived Academia Letters, February 2021 Corresponding Author: Michael Lück, mlueck@aut.ac.nz Citation: Lück, M., Seeler, S., Radic, A. (2021). Hitting the reset button for post-COVID-19 cruise tourism: The case of Akaroa, Aotearoa New Zealand. Academia Letters, Article 219. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL219. 1 ©2021 by the authors — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0