CRUISING AND 'NO GO' AREAS- SOME THOUGHTS

Amid news that President Trump is considering reinstating the recently lifted, decades old travel ban on Americans visiting Cuba, there is speculation that some, if not all of the cruise lines that have recently returned to the Caribbean hot spot, may have to withdraw. It also follows that there may be a knock on effect for European cruise lines such as Celestyal and MSC, each of which has a ship based year round on sailings out of Havana.

Quite apart from the quixotic, often odd decisions made by the orange utang in chief of the USA, cruise lines are notoriously sensitive to how events abroad play out in terms of passengers safety, and the potential for any possible problems. This year, Turkey has suffered a massive implosion in numbers of cruise ship visits after the well documented violence of last year. The port of Kusadasi, scheduled for well over five hundred individual ship visits this year, is now down to a couple of hundred.

Yet I walked through all the usual sites of Kusadasi just a few weeks ago, without the slightest problem. It was much quieter than is often the case, but it felt no less safe or secure than at any time over the last twenty years. So, are some of the lines simply being over cautious, or are they actually reacting to a tidal wave of negativity to bad headlines?

I'm inclined to think that it's more the latter. Remember the awful terrorist attack in Tunisia, when gunmen shot around thirty tourists dead? Virtually every big cruise ship in the Mediterranean was diverted away from Tunisian ports for years in some cases. Only now is the fractured market really beginning to pick up apace.. And the fact remains that most cruise passengers these days are still American and, for them, all of the European cruise circuit is increasingly looking like a game of Russian roulette.

But the bottom line is that cruise companies are in a risk aversive business. They depend on a constant stream of on board revenue to thrive, and empty ships sailing in parts of the world perceived as dangerous are not going to deliver that. It's as much about financial as personal securty, but the two do go hand in hand. If the cruise lines seem overly cautious to some, then maybe it's because they have twice as much reason to be so.

It's not an ideal situation, but the good news is that there are lots of alternative choices out there. I guess the trick is simply to keep calm, and carry on cruising, I'll see you out there.