Several cruise majors have begun to use their own cruiseships to repatriate non-essential crew stranded on board idled vessels.
That these ships are set to make extended voyages from the US and Europe to Asia indicates that companies foresee bleak prospects of a resumption of trading in the forthcoming months.
Cruise industry sources said a small armada of cruiseships is heading to Asia to repatriate crew back to the Philippines and Indonesia. Most of those being repatriated are employed at the hotel departments on board the ships and are not needed without passengers.
Holland America Line’s 86,300-gt Eurodam (built 2008) picked up non-essential crew from two fleet-mates, the 55,600-gt Maasdam (built 1993) and 82,900-gt Westerdam (built 2004) off La Paz, a Mexican port in the Sea of Cortez, over the Easter weekend. The ship began its voyage to Asia on Monday.
Similarly, Costa Crociere’s 85,600-gt Costa Mediterranea (built 2003) was also in the process of taking on non-essential crew from the 114,400-gt Costa Pacifica (built 2009) and 102,700-gt Costa Fortuna (built 2003) in La Spezia over the weekend. As of Monday, the ship was still docked in the north-eastern Italian port preparing for departure.
Each ship is expected to take two to three weeks to reach its destination.
Holland America and Costa are owned by Carnival Corp.
"We have been repatriating our crews around the globe as part our pause announced in March," Carnival spokesman Roger Frizzell told TradeWinds.
He would not confirm use of the aforementioned ships in the repatriation.
Set to arrive earlier in Asian waters are a handful of cruiseships that were forced outof Australian territorial waters earlier this month, including four belonging to Royal Caribbean Cruises and two from Carnival Cruise Line.
Calls to Royal Caribbean were not immediately returned.
All are expected to discharge their non-essential crews in Indonesia and the Philippines before heading off to lay up in a port or anchorage willing to receive them. There are strong market suggestions that they may bide their time of idleness in one of several anchorages near the Singapore Strait that are controlled by Malaysia.
The lines have resorted to the expensive, time-consuming option of sending crews home via cruiseship because they are unable to disembark crews due to restrictions by port authorities worldwide. The lack of available airlift is also a large contributing factor, as the hotel departments on most large cruiseships number in the thousands.
Coronavirus-free ships
Sources with knowledge of the repatriation plan said that only crews from ships that have had no recorded cases of Covid-19 are being transported.
Furthermore, the length of time crews will spend isolated at sea in a coronavirus-free environment will allow cruise lines to declare the ships free from the virus on arrival at their Asian destinations.
It remains unclear whether the crews will have to undergo further quarantining when they arrive at the ports.
Repatriating large numbers of non-essential seafarers is a clear sign that cruise lines are expecting the shutdown caused by the pandemic to continue for the foreseeable future. Most operators had been keeping their vessels in warm lay-up with full crews on board in the hope that they could resume trading this month.
Late in March, most cruise lines pushed their resumption dates into May, although for US-based operators the deadline was pushed back even further by the Centers for Disease Controland Prevention, which declared a 100-day moratorium on the resumption of cruise services from US ports.
This decision is likely to push cruise operators to put more ships into cold lay-up, with only skeleton crews on board to carry out maintenance work, and their return to active service will be staggered over several months.
Carnival Corp said in late March that keeping a ship in warm lay-up with a full crew on board costs in the region of $3m per month, while placing a ship into cold lay-up with only essential crew reduced the cost to $1m per month.
Cruise lines have found it especially difficult to find docking space for their idled ships in US waters. Most ships have been forced to wait out the pandemic at anchorages off the coast of Florida, or in the sheltered waters of the Bahamas.
