Authorities around the world halted voyages on large passenger ships in March after Covid-19 tore through scores of vessels, but cruising never really stopped.
Smaller cruise ships exempted from the suspension continued to sail selected routes. To keep the deadly virus off ships, these boutique operators experimented with a variety of new precautions.
The result: They mostly failed.
Coronavirus infections repeatedly pierced so-called safety bubbles promoted by luxury cruise lines. Since June, about 200 people have tested positive for the virus on nearly two dozen cruises, according to a Wall Street Journal tally. At least one person, a crew member, died in his cabin with the virus, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“Transmission has not been controlled sufficiently,” the CDC said in a September report that cited the virus’s continued spread on smaller cruise ships as one of the agency’s reasons for extending its ban on sailing for large ships.
The recent outbreaks suggest that it will be nearly impossible to prevent the spread of infections in the short term without extreme measures that would drastically increase costs and reduce the entertainment value of a cruise.
That reality has put the big companies that turned cruising from a luxury escape into a high-volume business— Carnival Corp. CCL -0.60% , Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. NCLH -0.82% and Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. RCL 1.27% —in a race against the clock. They need to find a way to get ships moving again so they can start generating revenue again.
The more the industry learns about the virus, the clearer it becomes that an arsenal of expensive precautions are needed. Many of the smaller ships that sailed through the summer and fall imposed a series of new protocols such as requiring preboarding Covid tests, daily temperature checks and sharply reduced passenger loads.
Luxury brand Ponant, owned by French billionaire François Pinault, scheduled travel through nearly virus-free French Polynesia on its ship Paul Gauguin. Norway’s Hurtigruten Group AS restricted participation on the Roald Amundsen’s cruise along fjords to the country’s residents. Seattle-based UnCruise Adventures promised to reinvent its popular cruises in Alaska aboard the Wilderness Adventurer with a slew of new protections, such as operating at 40% passenger capacity and adding frequent Covid tests, temperature checks and limiting movements on and off the ship.