How the cruise industry should return in Malaysia and globally amid Covid-19

Cruise lines have effective procedures for handling onboard health crises, but only the public health authorities in the countries where they berth have control over how ships disembark sick passengers. — AFP

The cruise industry has virtually ceased to exist during the Covid-19 pandemic. Cruise lines have cancelled departures for most or all of the summer season, while many of the ships are anchored in or off various ports around the world (many of them are anchored near Manila in the Philippines, where onboard staff have been repatriated).

At least one cruise line has already announced that onboard buffets will be eliminated or drastically changed once operations resume, and that spurred many other ideas about how the industry might take advantage of the downtime to retool – not just from a health and safety perspective but to address many of the concerns that have long been shared by those both within and outside of the cruising sphere.

From my own perspective, cruising is something of a seagoing paradox. The exciting highs of seagoing adventure and wonder at big-ship engineering are often counterbalanced by an unpleasantly circus-like atmosphere patently engineered for its run amok around the altars of spectacle, consumption and commerce.

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Perhaps it’s time for the cruise industry to reassess not only their health and safety standards in the wake of the new world that undoubtedly awaits travellers at the end of this pandemic, but also to reassess the industry’s overall impact and direction in the future of the travel industry.

I have some hopes, in no particular order.

Buffets

On the subject of buffets, I’ll admit I didn’t shed tears when I learned of Royal Caribbean’s plans to eliminate or exhaustively rework them. I’ve never quite understood the appeal of spending one’s leisure time in an onboard restaurant that patently reinforces the mass-produced nature of dining onboard large ships.

Some of the bigger cruise ships will have restaurants onboard that do not serve buffets. Guests would have to pay extra to dine at these establishments. — Costa Asia

Nautical-themed carpet, brass railings and ocean vistas aside, there’s little to separate these (often 24-hour) feeding troughs from any other institutional cafeteria. In fact, they often compromise some of the mystique of onboard dining, as anyone with a table at the late seating in the dining room knows if they wander in for a snack in the late afternoon to find a disturbingly similar menu line-up – sometimes the only difference between meals in the dining room and meals at the buffet is who plates and serves the food.

There are also ethical issues surrounding food waste. While seagoing galleys have a long tradition of stretching food as far as possible, buffets certainly don’t assist that effort.

Ship size

I’m often amazed when I watch a rerun of The Love Boat, and someone makes an awestruck comment about the size of the ship’s passenger complement – a then-large 600 passengers. The largest cruise ship today carries over 10 times as many passengers as Pacific Princess did in 1976.

Combined with the crew complement that’s nearly 9,000 people on a single vessel – just imagine the impact on a community when a ship that large shows up in port to disembark and re-embark that many people in the space of a few hours. It snarls traffic, creates refuse, inflates commodity pricing, clogs supply chains and creates jobs, but not always steady or high-paying ones, or ones that are filled by local residents instead of expat seasonal workers (the diamond shops, in particular, tend to rotate non-resident staff between Alaska and the Caribbean).

Today’s large cruise ships, like the Caribbean Princess, can can host more than 3,500 passengers; the world’s largest ship – Symphony Of The Seas – can fit more than 5,500 passengers. — AFP

Thanks to sophisticated propulsion systems, today’s mega liners are more manoeuvrable in crowded ports than ships have ever been, but there have still been recent, well-publicised incidents involving large ships running into piers, smaller vessels or each other. Harbour pilots in several Alaska cities have also expressed concern about the increasing size of the cruise ships approaching their ports.

Now cruise lines aren’t entirely culpable here. It’s up to communities and ports to determine how much cruise traffic is too much, but the cruise industry is also no stranger to aggressively lobbying for their interests, particularly when communities propose taxes to help offset some of their infrastructure needs to support massive daily inflows and outflows of short-term visitors.

That said, it might be more sustainable for the industry to continue growth with ships of a more manageable size moving forward – from both a community and passenger perspective.

Monetisation

The notion of concessions onboard ships is hardly new (some Titanic survivors recall hearing jokes about settling bar tabs as the ship was sinking), but the engineered precision of sales pitches onboard today’s cruise ships reads like an MBA capstone.

There are constant “shills” (Balcony Dining! Drink Packages! Professional Photos! Future Cruises!) that bombard passengers seemingly everywhere: in-room television programming, daily printed programmes, “special invitations” and table tents.

It’s no secret that onboard spend is one of the primary revenue streams (and success metrics) for cruise companies, but the continued emphasis in onboard sales the past few years seems to have crossed the line into adversely impacting the onboard experience for many of the more aggressive cruise lines.

The passenger profile that returns immediately to cruising following the industry’s much-publicised pandemic response could easily take a different view.

The passenger profile that returns immediately to cruising following the industry’s much-publicised pandemic response could easily take a different view of the more highly messaged forms of sales advertisement onboard, and it’s an aspect of the passenger experience worth reviewing while the lines are on hiatus.

Onboard health

Cruise lines have a history of reacting swiftly to health threats. Several norovirus outbreaks onboard ships in the 2000s gave way to the proliferation of hand sanitiser stations and health questionnaires onboard most ships today.

What the world discovered during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic is that cruise ships found narrowing possibilities for ports to disembark passengers as the virus spread. Even after cruise lines restart operations, the memory of the cruise ships that spent days attempting to negotiate the right to land with a port in their vicinity, and the ships that were held in lengthy quarantines, counting large numbers of onboard infections, may still loom large in consumers’ memories.

While cruise lines have well-developed procedures in place for handling onboard outbreaks, it is the public health authorities in the countries where they berth that are the ultimate arbiters of how cruise lines disembark sick passengers.

Cruise lines and passengers have little control over how governments respond to health crises on inbound ships, but they can reassure passengers by sharing what details they can about their proactive planning conversations with their planned ports. The rest, unfortunately, is a leap of faith, but no more so than it was prior to the pandemic. – Travel Pulse/Tribune News Services