No industry suffered more during the pandemic than the cruise industry. Not only did Covid (with a big assist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) shut down all cruises from the US from March 2020 to July 2021, the industry’s return was a drag, not a sprint.
Those first July 2021 sailings sailed with hundreds, not thousands, of passengers like major cruise lines, Royal Caribbean International (RCL) Carnival Cruise Lines (CCL) and Norwegian Cruise Line (NCLH) worked under the CDC’s “conditional sailing order (CSO). Rules imposed by CSOs made operations challenging. The nature of Covid meant that even ships sailing where all passengers 12 and over had to be vaccinated and giving a negative test taken no more than two days before their sailing (which were all ships sailing from US ports) still produced Covid infections.
And while the vast majority of those infections did not lead to serious illness, the industry had a government problem and a perception problem. It’s not that people didn’t catch Covid on airplanes, in parks, at sporting events and concerts, or even in grocery stores, but those places had plausible deniability.
You can test negative, catch Covid buying a coffee in a crowded airport shop, then show up with symptoms somewhere in the middle of your cruise. Cruising didn’t give you Covid, but the CDC counted it as a positive case on board and used it to justify continued regulation while other industries dropped all Covid-related regulations.
However, in July, the CDC did what Royal Caribbean, Carnival and Norwegian had been asking for all along — it allowed the cruise lines to operate like any other travel-related business in the US.
Image source: Carnival
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Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norway changed their Covid rules
After the CDC stopped tracking Covid on cruise ships, the big three cruise lines moved quickly to change their rules. All three had already made wearing masks optional, but the industry big three then moved to remove/modify testing requirements and loosen or even eliminate vaccine requirements. All three companies do things a little differently, so it’s important to understand the exact rules and remember that they are always changing and may differ from your cruise.
Here’s where Carnival, Caribbean Royal and Norwegian stand now with the Covid rules (and remember the rules may be different based on ports and destinations):
- Carnival (as of September 6): Vaccinated visitors must still show the vaccination card, but no longer have to provide a negative pre-cruise test. Unvaccinated passengers no longer need to apply for an exemption, but must “submit the results of a negative PCR or antigen test obtained within three days of departure.” Guests under the age of five are exempt from vaccination and testing requirements.
- Royal Caribbean (as of September 5): Royal Caribbean will drop its vaccination requirements but will require testing in the same way as Carnival for most US cruises. Cruises departing from Florida, however, still require passengers 12 and older to be vaccinated. The cruise line will also require (for now) all passengers to provide a negative test taken within three days of their journey on longer five-night cruises.
- Norwegian (as of September 2): Unvaccinated guests will be allowed to sail but will need to provide a negative test taken within 72 hours of their sailing. Guests 11 and under will not need to be vaccinated or tested. Vaccinated passengers will not need to be tested.
Carnival shares good (maybe) news for Royal Caribbean, Norwegian
Lifting of Covid protocols allows more people to sail. All three major cruise lines are trying to balance getting more people on board with maintaining a safe environment, given that almost all people sailing since July 2021 were vaccinated and tested two days before boarding.
Carnival, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian don’t want to scare off customers who are still taking precautions against contracting Covid, so they’re trying to balance the needs of vaccinated and unvaccinated passengers. This seems to work spectacularly.
“We have previously revealed strong occupancy forecasts for the summer and our bookings through the end of 2022 have also been very solid,” Carnival President Christine Duffy said in a press release. “With further alignment of protocols with other vacation choices, our guests are booking the remaining 2022 inventory and planning the launch for 2023. Mid-August is not typically a busy month for cruise bookings, but it is clearly pent-up demand because Carnival has not been satisfied and guests are responding very well to our updated protocols.”
And while Royal Caribbean and Norwegian have different passenger profiles than Carnival, it’s likely that both cruise lines will see similar jumps in bookings once the Covid rules are lifted.
