B. CRUISE MARKET POTENTIAL

1. CRUISE MARKET POTENTIAL

Market Projections

Current Market

For greater understanding of the actual size of the market, this section presents the current and potential cruise market by actual population and potential cruisers.
The 2002 wave of the CLIA Cruise Industry Study indicates that 97 percent of the cruise market meets the following criteria, which were used to screen respondents for the current study:

• 25 years or older

• Live in households with earnings of $40,000 or more per year.

Population and study results indicate the following:

• The segment represents 44 percent of the total US population (289,092,000 in 2006), yielding 127,200,000 prime cruise candidates.

Of the target population, 49,608,000 (39% of 127,200,000) have ever taken a cruise, and more than half of those (55% - 25,840,000) have done so in the past three years.

TABLE 3
INCIDENCE OF CRUISING
 

Source: 2004 Market Profile Study