I'm Gary Bembridge, this is another of my cruising tips for travellers. I want to talk
about the five things that cruise ships are doing while cruising is suspended,
starting with this one. One of the biggest things that cruise ships are
actually doing while cruising is suspended is they are actually sailing all around
the world, to take crew back home. When cruising shut down in March, there were
literally hundreds of thousands of crew members on board ships that needed to
get home, either because cruising wasn't starting
up soon or their contracts were ended. Lots of restrictions were put in place,
particularly in the United States, around getting crew off ships and onto planes
to go home and, of course, we saw lots of countries closing their borders.
So, the cruise lines embarked on a massive operation to put crew on ships
from sister lines and sail them all around the world. They sailed
particularly to the Philippines, for example, and even today as I record this
in the Manila Bay there are 19 cruise ships still there repatriating crew. The
process once they get to the Philippines is relatively complicated, and takes a
while before they can repatriate. So in Manila Bay at this point in time are
ships like the Queen Elizabeth, the Sapphire princess, the nordam, Viking
Orion, Costa Atlantica, Golden Princess,Caledonian sky, Sea
Princess, Royal Princess, the Rotterdam, Sun Princess, Carnival spirit, Pacific
Dawn, Pacific Explorer, Pacific princess, sapphire Princess, Carnival panorama,
majestic princess... there are humongous amounts of cruise ships in Manila Bay.
It's quite a sight to behold, so one of the biggest things the cruise ships are
doing, and have been doing, is taking crew home. So even many months on they are
still repatriating crew, and this is going to still go on for some time.
The second thing they're doing is finding somewhere to wait. There are
roughly about 300 ships all around the world in the passenger cruising business,
and they're basically finding somewhere to hold up and wait. If you have a
favourite ship, or even a favourite cruise line and you want to know exactly where
the ships are at any point of time, there's an app that I use. The app is
called Marine Traffic it's a really great app there's a free version and a
paid version, and you can see exactly where
ships are any point of time. So you can find out where they are the ships are. They are
doing a couple of things, one they're basically finding a place where they can
wait, and also they starting to form in little
clusters around the world and finding places where they think they're going to be
able to start cruising again. So let's take a look at where some of those
clusters are. Obviously one of the biggest clusters of all is around the
ports of Miami / Fort Lauderdale area, which of course are two of the biggest
cruise ports in the world, and also you've got Port Canaveral just up the
coast. There we're seeing lots and lots of ships congregating around this area, and
Norwegian cruise lines, Carnival Cruise Lines, MSC Cruise Line, Holland America
and also of course Royal Caribbean cruise line, are all
having ships in this area, and again looking at the app I count at least 20
or 30 ships, and what they do is they're mostly hanging around the sort of
Bahamas area either just at sea or using their private islands as
a way of giving the crew some respite and some time on land, and then of course
head occasionally into port to restock. Another key area where they're
congregating is in the UK. Outside Southampton and even around Dover,
you're going to find lots of P&O ships, Cunard ships, Saga ships,
Marella ships. Once you get up to Scotland you'll find more of the Fred Olsen ships,
you'll find in fact even some of the Azamara ships. And we've also seen more
recently in Newcastle one or two ships from P&O appearing there, so
in the UK there's another whole bunch of ships. Italy, which is another big key
cruising area and home for lines like Costa, we are seeing ships again congregating
around the Italian coast. One of the other clusters of ships are ships that
were based in Australia. Australia closed all of their waters to cruise ships even
those that were home ported there, and most of those moved off to Manila. So
basically cruise ships are sitting out at sea, largely speaking and waiting and
forming in little clusters and so I am watching those ships that are clustered
near those big cruise ports, because that's probably sign of which ships may
come on tap much earlier than other ships. The next thing
the cruise ships are doing, and cruise lines are doing, to the cruise ships is
try to drive down the cost of keeping those ships going. It's
extremely expensive to keep a cruise ship ready to get into service. I saw
numbers up to like 100 million dollars per ship to keep them ticking over at
the beginning of the shutdown. So what the cruise lines are doing on those
cruise ships is moving them from what's known as a hot lay-up to a cold
lay-up. In a cold lay-up is where they're basically wind down the
ship, so it's not ready to go into service really quickly. They're moving
into cold lay up because that is much cheaper for them to do, and they have
been through that process and they're still going through that process. Of
course they're doing ongoing maintenance, making sure that there's
daily maintenance going on to keep the ships up to scratch and also to
keep the crew still on active
and busy. One of the things that they're not doing to cruise ships though is
moving them into drydock. A whole bunch of ships were due to
go through dry docks and upscale, Celebrity of course had their whole
celebrity upgrade process and Royal Caribbean were going through a series of upgrades
of their ships, pretty much all of those dry docks have been postponed for quite
a long period of time. So they're not spending a lot of money on big upgrades
on ships that were due, so those are things that are not happening
on cruise ships. It's basically basic maintenance. The next thing that they are
doing though is making some of the protocol changes and getting ready for
return to cruising. One of the most consistent things I'm seeing across all
of the cruise lines announcing is upgrades to the ventilation system, where
they're putting in various systems which will purify the air much more, or they're
changing their ventilation and air-conditioning systems, and they're
bringing much more fresh air, because because there's lots of concerns about
the role of ventilation air conditioning in spread of the virus. And so what the
cruise lines are doing, because I know that's a big issue and is a big
discussion point, is they're installing air purifiers into their systems,
even on new ships like Scarlet Lady has had that whole system upgraded and
changed and for some of the older ships they're upgrading all of those, and we've
seen that pretty consistent across all of the cruise lines. The other thing that
cruise ships are doing while they are in suspension and unable to cruise, is make
sure that those crew that do remain on the ship are kept busy, occupied and are
kept as positive as can be. There's the physical medical side, where you'll
find many of we'll have twice daily temperature
checks, they've all been given accommodation private accommodation so
they're not sharing accommodation, there is an amount of social distancing on
board to try and make sure that the crew that are on board stay healthy and
there's no outbreak on board. One of the big challenges the crew are facing, of course,
is much more mental health challenges, and we've seen some very unfortunate
incidents where crew have got really really desperate, and so one of the key
things the cruise lines are now trying to do on their cruise ships is to try
and run a happy ship, and a ship which has much more counseling and help for
crew - because clearly if you're stuck on board you're away from home for very
long time and there's no early indications of when you can get back to
work, when you can get home, that is putting enormous pressure on crew and
we're seeing more and more activity around what cruise ships are doing to try and
keep crew not only physically and medically happily, but also mentally
happy. Cruise ships are pretty much not able to sail, but we are seeing a few
pockets popping up where Hurtigruten has a few ships now sailing in Norway, the t
SeaDream ships are coming on stream, we are seeing one or two river cruise ships
start up and of course we're seeing lots of people hoping to start in July and
August like UnCruise, why are hoping to start up again because they have smaller ships
(under 250 passengers) so they don't fall under the CDC rules, so there's quite a
lot of things that are going on, with cruise ships mostly it's around waiting,
positioning and getting ready for the day when cruising starts again. Hope you
found this interesting and helpful. I have loads more videos packed full of
cruising tips advice and insights so why don't you watch another one of those
right now?