The sustainability of cruise tourism has received considerable attention in the last few years. CLIA (2018) and World Tourism Organization - UNWTO (2018) underline the necessity of stronger focus on sustainable tourism practices and procedures. Nowadays, both cruise tourists and cruise operators are aware of potential negative impacts of the cruise tourism on cruise destinations, which is especially important when a new port of call was introduced in the cruise line itinerary (Weeden & Dowling, 2016). In addition, along with the cruise industry, the focus of the academic community was also directed to customers’ pro-environmental behaviour and green loyalty in the cruise industry (Han et al., 2018).

The research aims to understand the relation of the motivation to involve in cruise tourism towards sustainability issues. By doing so the research follows Renaud’s (2020) arguments that sustainability will be one of the most critical issues when the industry tries to survive the ongoing disaster with the Covid19-pandemic. The study is contributing to the earlier research of Han et al. (2018), which have been directed to the cruise customers’ pro- environmental behaviour by considering the motivational processes.

Investigating the cruise travelers’ attitudes to sustainable behavior while cruising helps the destination management stakeholders in developing the destination towards sustainable futures.