Carnival Corporation has has announced it will suspend operations of the Princess Cruises line of ships after two of them became hotspots for the spread of the new corona virus. The 18 Princess Cruises ships stop sailing for at least two months. The news comes just a few days after the United States Department of State warned citizens not to travel on cruise ships to reduce the risk of the virus spreading.
Anyone currently on board a Princess Cruises voyage that is scheduled to end in the next five days “will continue to sail as expected until the end of the itinerary so that further travel arrangements are not disrupted,” the company wrote Thursday. All voyages currently underway and going beyond March 17 will be “terminated at the most convenient location for guests, taking into account operational requirements,” the company said.
Carnival, which owns about 40 percent of the world cruise ship market, said on Thursday that affected Princess Cruises passengers will offer cash refunds or credit for a future cruise with an additional, unspecified “generous future cruise credit benefit”.
While Princess Cruises is only one of about a dozen different cruise lines owned by Carnival, the suspension has been one of the more drastic measures a transportation and travel industry company has taken since the new corona virus began to spread. Many major airlines have also suspended certain routes and reduced passenger change costs. (Lufthansa canceled about 50 percent of its flights, while US airlines have made more modest adjustments.) Amtrak has since seen her bookings drop by 50 percent and cancellations skyrocket 300 percent.
The Princess Princess ship from Princess Cruises was one of the first ships to be caught in the crosshairs of the new coronavirus outbreak. After it was believed that a number of passengers on board had contracted the virus, the ship had trouble finding a friendly port and eventually settled outside of Yokohama, Japan. The local government essentially forced the company to keep all 2,700 passengers and 1,000 crew quarantined on the ship.
This helped spread the virus, as well as a number of other apparent shortcomings on the side of Princess Cruises and Carnival. The New York Times recently reported that the cruise ship’s top physician and his team missed an email from a passenger informing them that they had been infected with the new corona virus. Even when the company found out, the doctor and team reportedly “played down the risk of infection, ignored best medical practices for evacuating passengers, and only activated low-level protocols for dealing with outbreaks.”
The US and other governments eventually had to evacuate their own citizens, but not before at least 700 passengers were infected with the virus. Eight of those people have now died of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.
A similar drama recently took place aboard the Grand Princess, which was parked in the waters just outside San Francisco when the U.S. government decided to deal with the boat’s sick passengers. Many of them were eventually fired and quarantined in a commercial port in Oakland.
“Never inside [our] For 55 years, and certainly not in the 20 years I’ve served in this company, we’ve been tested in the way we’ve been tested over the past 40 days, “said Princess Cruises president Jan Swartz in a 7-minute video on YouTube. Swartz called the suspension “perhaps the most difficult decision in our history.”
It’s unclear what effect the new coronavirus outbreak has had on cruise ship booking, but some people are attracted to reduced ticket prices, according to recent reports.
“We have certainly heard a lot of criticism about taking” a cruise, told a cruise ship passenger Bloomberg this week. “But we’ve decided whether to sanitize it or not, we’ll be fine.”
Meanwhile, the Miami New Times discovered members of the Norwegian Cruise Line sales team in Miami use coronavirus disinformation to encourage people to book traveleven if the pandemic spreads.