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Bad News? What Bad News?
The Travel Critic · July 19, 1999

Fires. Viruses. Sexual assaults. Sound like a plot for a summer disaster movie?

Wrong. More like a documentary on the cruise industry, 1998 to present. Consider:

A few months ago, Sun Cruises' Sun Vista caught fire and sank off the western coast of Malaysia. More than 1,100 passengers jumped into life rafts as the luxury liner went down.

Earlier this year, Royal Caribbean Cruises pleaded guilty to falsifying oil discharge records on the Nordic Prince. It faced more than $1 million in fines.

Last summer, 54 people on the Carnival Ecstasy suffered mostly minor injuries after a welder's torch in the laundry room ignited a flash fire.

A month earlier, 270 passengers on the Regal Princess became infected with the so-called "Norwalk virus" and had to be confined to quarters. It forced the cancellation of at least one cruise.

The latest controversy is Carnival Cruise Lines' admission last week that its crewmembers have been accused of sexual assault 62 times in the five years.

Is the bad news leaving the cruise industry with a sinking feeling? "No way," says Bridget Ann Serchak , a spokeswoman of the International Council of Cruise Lines, in Washington, D.C. "As far as we can tell, there's been no negative reaction from our customers."

The same can't be said of yours truly. I loathe boats. You're trapped on board for long periods with only starchy and tasteless meals to break the monotony. But mostly, it's the swells that get me. Memories of my last cruise in Alaska - out in the open Pacific with nine-foot seas in September - remain vivid enough to turn me a shade of green.

But it seems there's a surplus of cruisers out there who don't share my sentiments. Cruise lines are scrambling to meet demand, spending more than $10 billion to boost capacity by more than 50 percent within the next five years. This year alone, the industry trade group Cruise Lines International Association projects a 9 percent growth in passengers.

And while I'd like nothing more than to chart the decline of this $7 billion-a-year industry, I have to concede that it would be going overboard to make much of the recent reports.

Let's start with the sexual assaults on Carnival. You'd have to be awfully naive to be outraged by the allegations. Doesn't anyone remember The Love Boat?

A recent survey by Porthole magazine concluded that the "fictional episodes are very real." The most popular places for what it delicately termed "onboard intimacy" were the cabin, followed by the pool and "in a lifeboat," according to respondents.

Carnival's attorney, Curtis Mase, issued a statement last week pointing out that the cruise line carried "more than 6.5 million satisfied guests along with tens of thousands of crew members" during the five-year period in question.

Honestly, I'm astonished that there haven't been more complaints, given all of those passengers lured by the romance of the seas. "When you get lots of people together in one place, things happen," says Laura Bennett, an Orlando cruise industry consultant. "People drink too much. They don't sleep. They err on the side of too much fun."

What about the rest of the controversy - the sinkings, viruses and illegal dumping? Well, when things go wrong at sea, ships go down. Now during the last big disaster, the sinking of the Sun Vista, there were no fatalities. Zero. When's the last time everyone walked away from a plane crash? Or a train wreck?

Viruses happen on land, too, wherever you put lots of people together in a confined space. In hotels, hospitals and at resorts. Those outbreaks don't get anywhere near the kind of publicity that their floating counterparts do.

As to the dumping, my only surprise is at the ineptitude of the U.S. Coast Guard for not catching more ships evacuating their septic tanks within our territorial waters. Cruise lines are notorious polluters that act above the law from the moment they register their vessels in places like the Bahamas and Liberia, where they can elude American taxes, labor laws and safety standards.

Through it all, cruising is alive and well, courtesy of vacationers like Rob Zelickman, an auto mechanic from Oak Park, Mich. He endured a nightmare voyage from hell from Miami to Cozumel, Mexico, recently, sharing the ship with 600 members of a Brazilian soccer club and sweating through meals in a dining room in which the air conditioners were broken.

When he complained to the captain, he was told to "go buy an air conditioner if you don't like it." You would think that after an experience like that, Zelickman would never, ever want to set foot on a ship again, right? Nope. Later this year, he and 10 relatives are taking another cruise, hoping this one will be better.

Now that's what I call customer loyalty.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator and author of A Bridge to Nowhere: A Year in the Florida Keys. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.