With vaccinated Americans now benefitting from relaxed travel restrictions, CLIA is fuming that the cruise industry has not similarly had its shackles removed. “The irony is that today an American can fly to any number of destinations to take a cruise, but cannot board a ship in the US,” says the association.
Calling updated guidelines from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued on April 2 “disappointing,” CLIA says it is reiterating its request for the Framework for Conditional Sailing Order (CSO) to be lifted.
In a statement released earlier this week, CLIA, which represents 95 percent of global ocean-going cruise capacity and the largest network of travel agents and agencies specializing in cruise travel, said it supports the US government’s priority to control the COVID-19 virus and respects the CDC’s authority to implement public health measures, but added it believes the new requirements are “unduly burdensome, largely unworkable, and seem to reflect a zero-risk objective rather than the mitigation approach to COVID that is the basis for every other US sector of our society.”
They also fail to recognize the public health advances that have been made over many months “including the ability to effectively mitigate risk on cruise ships.”
CLIA said the continuing ban on cruising in US waters means that “half a million Americans – from longshoremen and ground transportation operators to hotel, restaurant, and retail workers, travel agents, and tens of thousands of businesses that service cruise ships, are continuing to financially suffer with no reasonable timeline provided for the safe return of cruising.”
“Moreover,” CLIA said, “the instructions are at odds with the approach the CDC and governments in other parts of the world apply to all other travel and tourism segments in mitigating the risk of COVID-19.”
The association noted that close to 400,000 passengers have already sailed from Europe and parts of Asia since last summer “following stringent, science-based protocols that resulted in a far lower incident rate than on land.”
At the same time, a number of cruise lines, including Crystal, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, and Viking, have announced summer start-ups in destinations like the Bahamas, Bermuda, Iceland, Israel, and the UK.
And more sailings that will bypass the US are likely to be announced, warned CLIA, further jeopardizing US jobs, businesses, and ports.
The Cruise Line International Association concluded by urging the US government to “consider the ample evidence that supports lifting the CSO this month to allow for the planning of a controlled return to service… by the Fourth of July… and avoid the negative consequences that come when cruising, and the workers who support it, are not afforded the same opportunities as other workers in industries with far fewer practices in place to provide for public health and well-being.”