This cruise ship example you keep using is a bit pointless and irrelevant to the overall debate really as its a rather niche and specific example of tourism.How interesting.
1.On cruise ship days they employ more staff, staff who wouldn't have been employed otherwise. Benefit.
2. The money that comes in from cruise ship days helps keep prices down during the rest of the year. Benefit.
3. Local craft firms, and its a heavily craft led economy, sell more items. Meaning they can pay wages. To people who work for them. Who produce more stuff. And maybe take more staff on. Benefit.
4. This also helps keep old traditions alive as well. Benefit.
Tourism comes in many forms though...if you buy Orcadian whisky from Amazon...then you are an Internet tourist and help keep the economy flowing on the islands. Money in equals secure jobs, secure jobs eequal confidence and increased spending. Big benefits.
It's a very good business model and one that has worked all over the world.
I could tell you about a mate of mine in Shetland who has a rather nice business dealing with wool, wool he gets from his sheep, wool that is quire popular around the world, wool that has provided an income to himself and the 20 odd people involved in the process. Some of which used to be unemployed due to fishing going down the pan. But I won't. I mean, it's obviously not going to help you understand or indeed change your mind.
And certainly you're reference to someone buying Orcadian whisky off Amazon as a form of "tourism" is borderline bizarre.
Admittedly those people occasionally pouring off cruise ships do provide a temporary injection of cash and I'll even acknowledge that those cruise ship tourists aren't directly responsible for the predominant economic downside of tourism, that obviously being the huge increase in the cost of local accommodation thanks to the demand for holiday home/holiday lets.
Although the cruise ship visitors do still make a significant contribution to the many other peripheral socio-economic downsides of tourism in terms of the pressure and demand they place on local public services and infrastructure and the associated additional costs to the local tax payers.
BUT, even with your example of the cruise ship tourists the fact remains that the vast proportion of any money they do spend still goes directly into the pockets of the tourism business owners, the few crumbs that any employees in those businesses get go no way at all toward making up for the NET socio-economic disadvantages they suffer from as a result of wider tourism.
I admire your self confidence in attempting to join the debate even though you’ve clearly demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of even the most basic economic principles and laws of supply and demand if you genuinely believe that tourists spending in an economy somehow "keeps prices down"... I have to inform you the very opposite happens.