In spite of today's rapid growth of world cruise industry, little academic attention has yet been given to the decision making problems for cruise operations. This research deals with strategic cruise itinerary planning that any cruise company should face. Increasing demands for international itineraries and redeployments of cruise ships are adding complexity to the itinerary planning. A slight modification of the conventional PERT/CPM network is adopted. to cope with this complexity

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... lly. By this, the concept of candidate itinerary network is suggested for each cruise ship. To integrate these candidate itinerary networks for each ship in a single framework, an integer programming model has been developed to find the optimal itinerary planning for any fleet of cruise ships. A numerical example, based on real cruise itinerary practices, is tested to validate and interpret the model.