How complicated has the hurricane season gotten for cruise ship captains? This week, they’re worrying about Hurricane Javier.
Javier?!
Don’t panic. It’s a Pacific storm threatening the west coast of Mexico.
But the Category 4 hurricane prompted Carnival Cruises to scrap a regular stop at Puerto Vallarta this week, and that was just one of the itineraries scrambled during an extraordinarily busy season for major storms.
Hurricane Frances swept so much sand into the channel leading to Port Canaveral that Royal Caribbean’s deep-hulled Mariner of the Seas can’t get back into its home port. Norwegian workers are hustling to repair the company’s private Bahamian island in time for a cruise this week. And Carnival bused more than 1,000 passengers Monday from Miami to Tampa after worries over Ivan prompted it to switch that cruise’s finale from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic.
As an industry that thrives on sun-soaked tours through the tropics, cruise lines know well the hassles hurricanes bring. But the back-to-back-to-back assaults of Charley, Frances and Ivan have left their operations particularly unsettled.
”We do not have good information out of the Cayman Islands yet,” Carnival spokeswoman Jennifer de la Cruz said as she tallied the world’s largest cruise company’s current hurricane-related headaches. “We are not sailing there this week, and we do not know when we’ll be able to get back in.”
Though Nassau recovered quickly from Frances, ships continue to avoid Freeport in the Bahamas. Ivan knocked out Ochos Rios in Jamaica this week as a Carnival port of call, and its predicted track by the Yucat�n Peninsula prompted Royal Caribbean to scratch Belize from its itineraries this week.
Like Norwegian’s Great Stirrup Cay, Disney’s private Bahamian island also suffered so much beach erosion from Frances that it stopped visiting there. But spokeswomen for both companies said visits to the islands would likely resume this week.
Frances and Ivan’s targeting of the Gulf of Mexico have forced cruise lines to deploy caravans of buses between Tampa and South Florida as they ferry passengers across the state to their ships’ temporary home ports.
The scrambled schedules forced cruise lines to reimburse passengers the cost of rebooking flights. And last week, the Miami-based Royal Caribbean and Carnival announced lower earnings forecasts for the year because of the storms.
But if the storms test the cruise lines’ operations, they also highlight the industry’s flexibility. As a floating, largely self-contained vacation, cruise ships are able to swap destinations midvoyage and plot a course through waters not threatened by a storm’s path.
Or they can steer clear of land altogether: Carnival and Royal Caribbean ships pulled into Fort Lauderdale and Miami a day or two late after waiting out Frances last week.
”That is definitely one thing that’s great about a cruise vacation,” Disney Cruise Lines spokeswoman Rena Langley said. “You can change the course of the ship.”
Douglas hanks III, The Miami Herald
