seven karaoke rooms<\/a>\u00a0and bigger casinos. Royal Caribbean, the second-largest cruise company, has two liners scheduled to travel to China this year. No changes have been made to those plans.<\/p>\n\u201cWe have already taken aggressive steps to minimize risk through boarding restrictions and itinerary changes,\u201d Richard Fain, chief executive of Royal Caribbean, said in a statement last week. The CLIA says that cruise companies have been \u201cagile and responsive\u201d to the situation.<\/p>\n
The industry has faced crises before. The sinking of the Costa Concordia in 2012 off the coast of Italy led to 32 deaths. A year later, 4,200 passengers and crew were stranded on the Carnival Triumph for nearly a week without power after an engine room fire, while norovirus outbreaks frequently hit the headlines.<\/p>\n
But \u201ccrashing a cruise ship is not contagious, nor is running out of electricity,\u201d says Brignall, adding that with a high number of older passengers and enclosed conditions on board, \u201cif something slips through the net, then the impact can be huge.\u201d<\/p>\n
David Handley, a maritime lawyer at Watson Farley & Williams in London, says that the most pressing issue was routing ships out of Asia. \u201cHow do cruise lines deal with some very expensive assets that were scheduled to be in Asia and which now there\u2019s no point having in Asia because people just won\u2019t travel,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
As operators wait for Asian sailings to resume, the cruise industry has been quick to highlight the stringency of its regular sanitation procedures.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe do checks during the voyage as well as checks at the beginning. Crew members are trained to look out for unwell passengers,\u201d says one industry executive, who asked not to be named. \u201cIt is one of the things on which we place most value.\u201d<\/p>\n
All cruise ships have a hospital room and passengers are regularly encouraged to use hand sanitizer. Since the coronavirus outbreak, larger cruise companies have started operating mandatory temperature scans before boarding and passengers from China have been banned from sailing.<\/p>\n
They have also paid out millions in compensation. Based on an average cabin price for next year, the cancellation of a full capacity 12-day cruise on Norwegian from Hong Kong would cost the company in the region of $3 million in refunds.<\/p>\n
But while customers are compensated for canceled trips, most major cruise lines do not have commercial insurance to cover situations such as the coronavirus outbreak because premiums are punishingly high. Costs will have to be absorbed or paid out from a mutual liability insurance available through a group of shipowners\u2019 clubs called the International Group of P&I Clubs.<\/p>\n
Claims in excess of the $10 million retained by individual member clubs are pooled between the whole group.<\/p>\n
Eric Chung, 68, who was aboard the Diamond Princess with his family, says that staff had been guarding passageways and passengers had only been allowed on deck if they were wearing masks and rubber gloves.<\/p>\n
He brushes off the quarantine measures saying he would happily take another cruise, but next time would book a cabin with windows. As the executive points out: \u201cThe cost of a screw-up is huge. People have to be comfortable on board. Bad PR from cutting any corners could be a business killer.\u201d<\/p>\n
**<\/strong>Image source<\/em>:<\/strong>\u00a0ALESSANDRO DI CIOMMO\/NURPHOTO VIA GETTY<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dream holidays becoming a nightmare for cruise passengers have deeply […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":25120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1069,45],"tags":[80,99,1385,3177,3329,3328,13,3330,2619,95],"class_list":["post-25119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-editors-choice","category-industry","tag-business","tag-ceo","tag-ceo-northam","tag-coronavirus","tag-coronavirus-outbreak","tag-cruise-industry","tag-health","tag-ozy-news","tag-transportation","tag-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25119"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26680,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25119\/revisions\/26680"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/servidor-mxigen1.com\/ceona-antiguo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}