This month, there have been many stories about problems on cruises.
A man has been arrested in Texas after allegedly killing a woman during a trip to the Caribbean. A pianist on a Royal Caribbean cruise from California was rescued by two fishermen in the Pacific Ocean after going overboard. And Singapore seized the MV Odyssey, a US cruise ship meant to offer retirees a “permanent” life at sea. The operator, strapped for cash due to rising fuel prices, dropped off all its passengers in Cambodia.
Bizarre stories like this always seem to appear in the news cycle, and yet the number of people going on cruises increases every year.
Indeed, unlike the White Lotus resorts, the setting of HBO’s dark comedy, where we know that by the end of the week at least one guest will die, fatal mishaps and epidemics on cruises are actually very rare.
Pleasure is much more common, according to cruise enthusiasts. So people continue to board and the industry continues to move forward at 25 knots.
“You’re not packing and packing; you’re not checking in and out of hotels; and you don’t wake up in the same boring place every day,” said Stewart Chiron, nicknamed “the cruise guy” because of his expertise in the industry. “Don’t like a port? Get back on the ship, you sail to the next one, and you wake up in a new place with new adventures.”
From 2010 to 2019, the number of people who took cruises around the world more than doubled, according to the Cruise Lines International Association, the industry’s largest trade group. In 2010, there were 14.8 million passengers; in 2019, there were 29.7 million.
Then, in early 2020, Covid-19 spread among cruise ship passengers around the world. The Carnival-owned Diamond Princess was sailing around Asia in January with about 3,700 passengers and crew when the captain learned that a passenger disembarking in Hong Kong had tested positive for the virus. Two days later, he informed the crew and passengers of the situation, and they ultimately had to spend two weeks quarantined in their cabins. Fourteen people have died and 712 have been confirmed to have the virus.
Deadly Covid outbreaks have also occurred on other ships. Cruise lines wondered whether the industry could recover.
As noted, unfortunate events happened on cruises before and after the pandemic. In April, the MV Hondius left Ushuaia, Argentina, a city nicknamed “the end of the world”, with the intention of traveling to Antarctica, but the hantavirus began to spread among the passengers. Three people died.
Last year, Netflix released a documentary, Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, about a 2013 trip on the Carnival Triumph, where a fire broke out, causing a power outage and sewage flooding the ship.
But the cruise industry remains cash-rich. In 2025, 37.2 million people took cruises, the trade group reported.
Indeed, while such incidents attract media attention, they are actually outliers, Chiron said.
From 2010 to 2019, 439 deaths were reported on 78 river and ocean cruise lines, according to a study in the International Journal of Travel Medicine and Global Health. During that time, more than 215 million people took cruises, according to the trade group, meaning the deaths were unusual events.
“Consumer confidence in cruises is extraordinarily high. They know that these one-off situations don’t make sense. Accidents are accidents,” Chiron said.
As for whether cruises serve as incubators for infectious diseases, traveling on one of the ships is no riskier than taking a bus tour, flying or “just being in a crowd,” said Cindy Prins, an epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Central Florida.
In 2024, 19 million U.S. passengers took ocean cruises, according to the trade group. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that on voyages including U.S. and foreign ports in 2024, there were 18 outbreaks of acute gastroenteritis — when 3% or more of passengers or crew members report symptoms such as diarrhea or vomiting to medical personnel — during which a total of 2,041 people became ill, meaning they represented a tiny proportion of U.S. cruise ship passengers. Additionally, because crew members are required to immediately report their symptoms to medical personnel, outbreaks are detected more quickly at sea than on land, the CDC says.
Still, to keep passengers safe, Disney cruise staff hand out disinfectant wipes to guests when they enter a restaurant, said Brooke Rodriguez, a mother of three who has been on two Disney cruises in the past two years and is now planning a third. If a traveler enters a buffet area, staff directs them to a sink to wash their hands.
When Rodriguez’s daughter, Isla, who is “obsessed with princesses,” wore a dress to meals, servers and hosts also said to her, “‘Hi, princess’ or ‘Welcome, princess,’ which for a five-year-old wearing a princess dress was just the ultimate treat,” said Rodriguez, who lives outside Denver.
Rodriguez compared efforts to promote good hygiene on the high seas to a restaurant on land, where you don’t know what others have done.
“But I know on this ship the number of people who washed their hands when they came in,” said Rodriguez, an independent communications consultant, who also made sure her family got Covid and flu shots before leaving shore.
The two Disney cruises cost Rodriguez, her husband and their three children an average of $8,500, she said.
“Planning a week with a hotel, flights, tickets and park passes and all that for a Disney park experience, to me, that would cost more,” Rodriguez, 39, said.
Joyce Lipkind, owner of A&R Block Travel, a St. Louis agency, sells 50 to 75 cruise vacations each year. About half travel across oceans; the other half is on rivers.
Most customers are seniors. One woman takes two to three Viking river cruises each year.
“You unpack once, and that’s where you stay the whole time,” said Lipkind, whose mother founded the agency in 1976. “It gets a little tiring when you have one night here and two nights there, and you have to keep packing and moving either by bus or plane.”
When asked if customers were concerned about a possible virus outbreak on board, Lipkind said no.
She added: “I think older people have been there, done that, seen it all. »
Gn tech
