Q – Thank you for the information you give about some of the things you need to be careful about on some of these cruise ships. My 17 year-old daughter has asked me to let her go with a friend on a three-night Royal Caribbean Bahamas cruise. Her friends mother will be going, but she has three other children and is traveling with other family members, so I just don’t see how she would have time to watch out for my daughter. She really wants to go and I am leaning toward letting her. Can I assume the crew will keep an eye on any young people who seem unsupervised? No one in our family has cruised. Please respond as soon as possible.
A – The cruise industry has not, for rather obvious reasons, been interested in discussing crime, particularly crimes of a sexual nature, that take place on the high seas. Crimes aboard cruise ships include rapes of passengers by crew members. An attorney who represents many of the victims of on-board crime, reports that there were 959 crimes at sea reported to the FBI during one 18-month period in 2011 and 2012. Specific allegations regarding NCL, Holland America, and Royal Caribbean and others can be examined on the web site www.cruiselawnews.com.
We urge you, in the strongest terms, not to allow your daughter to travel on a mass market mega-ship unless you, or a member of your immediate family you can trust, accompanies her and provides full-time supervision. Ships with thousands of guests, none of whom has to go through any background screening, serviced by a largely transient crew that is denied basic rights under US labor laws, is a recipe for disaster. The fact that these ships operate in international waters under phony out-of-country registrations of convenience, is even more cause for concern.
It is true that the vast majority of cruises are incident-free. But it is also true that the industry has done everything possible to hide the facts of on-board crime from the public. We just don’t see any travel agent or cruise sites discussing these issues in-depth. Somehow, consumers feel that “you get what you pay for” does not apply to cruise vacations. It does, particularly as concerns crew background, training, and crimes against passengers.
