Safety at sea
That includes legionnaires disease, measles and swine flu. This last disease, in particular, prodded operators into action when it struck in 2009, with cruise bosses among the first tourism professionals to institute temperature checks and robust screening for passengers.
While transmission via surfaces is extremely low, cruise operators continue to disinfect every inch of a ship to calm passenger anxieties.
shadowed by rabbit warrens of detail, from HVAC ventilators to powerful disinfectants to touchless embarkation. Nor are these expenses cheap. Norwegian alone expects to spend an extra $100m on health and safety.
“It really is about the operators taking actions that are perceived by customers as minimising risk. For consumers, as long as they perceive the measures to work, they will regain confidence in cruising.”
The percentage of people eager for daily updates on Covid-19.
Dr Jennifer Holland
The percentage of people more reluctant to go on a cruise since the pandemic – 69% feel less positive about cruising in general.
Dr Jennifer Holland 24 67% 63%
Press officers are obviously keen to trumpet how these efforts will keep passengers secure. But then again journalists aren’t the ones they need to convince. Beyond the actual scientific efficacy of contactless ordering or extra isolation rooms, implicit in CruiseHealth and its cousins are attempts to reassure passengers themselves. They’re the ones who actually take cruises, after all, and they’re the ones who’ll ultimately keep company balance books in the black. Yet the link between health and safety operations and customer comfort is far from straightforward. The human brain is far too irrational for that. Instead, operators are having to reflect more subtly on what will make passengers feel safe – even if this isn’t what will actually keep them safe.
All at sea
For years before Covid-19, cruise operators prided themselves on their health and safety regimes. In part, this is thanks to a history of disease outbreaks, most recently norovirus in 2019, to take just one example. The gastrointestinal bug infected hundreds of passengers and dozens of staff aboard a Royal Caribbean ship off Miami, forcing the vessel to return to port. Plenty of other illnesses have proliferated on cruise ships too.
More than the illnesses themselves, however, cruise operators have arguably been so tough on swine flu and the rest because of how passengers perceive them. Consider the following: though it’s sometimes referred to as the ‘cruise ship disease’, your chance of catching norovirus on a cruise ship (one in 5,500) is actually far lower than for landlubbers (one in 15). Dr Jennifer Holland, an expert in risk perception at Suffolk Business School, has noticed similar confusion for other seaborne dangers. Though you’re only 0.0000006% likely to fall overboard from a cruise ship, in her research Holland has “heard several people tell me they worry about this”.
What could explain this dissonance between perceived and actual risk? For Holland, the answer might come from the fickleness of the human brain. As she explains, studies have found that people tend to give more weight to potentially negative outcomes. In short, a frightening disease like Covid- 19 is more likely to elicit what Holland describes as a stronger “perception of risk” – regardless of the actual dangers involved. More to the point, Holland continues, these fears can quickly snowball. If someone already has “unfavourable” attitudes towards a venture, they’ll “judge the risk as high and the benefits low.” It hardly helps that cruise travel already comes with a host of other hypothetical risks, from claustrophobia and agoraphobia to worries about the vessel itself. Given their long tradition promoting health and safety, to say nothing of the vagaries of group psychology, you might imagine that operators would have rushed to reassure passengers the moment Covid-19 emerged. Actually, the opposite is true. The first few months of the pandemic were characterised by silence, with the Healthy Sail Panel only appearing several months into the crisis. Due to a number of serious Covid-19 outbreaks – around 50 ships saw cases, and 83 people died – operators invariably saw their reputations sink. “Cruises are viewed now by many as risky places,” says Holland, something certainly supported by the numbers. According to one recent poll, 67% of people are more reluctant to go on a cruise since the pandemic, while 69% claim they feel less positive about cruising in general.
Risk fakers
Schemes like the Healthy Sail Panel can be understood in this context: as attempts to placate worried punters as much as genuine medical interventions. If nothing else, this is reflected in the sorts of innovations that operators are promoting.
World Cruise Industry Review /
www.worldcruiseindustryreview.com
Neptunestock/
Shutterstock.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61
