YVR Cockroach

One has wonder if the corporation-wide cost-cutting is starting to show.

Despite Carnival Corp.'s strong ties with the U.S. and several of its major brands HQ'd in the U.S., I doubt the U.S. government has much jurisdiction over any of Carnival's ships which are all foreign flagged (Carnival appears to flag its ships in Bahamas, Panama and Malta, Holland America in the Netherlands, Princess in Bermuda, P&O in Bermuda and the U.K., Costa and Aida in Italy, Seabourn in Bahamas).

chollie

A former executive at my company was all about cost-cutting. As he saw it, that was his sole function, to cut costs.

At a meeting, someone once asked him if it was ever possible to cut too far - and how he'd know if he had cut too deep.

His answer was: "You keep cutting until the screams are deafening, then you back off one inch."

Carnival may be getting close to that point....

Sam75

It can ruin the company it is sad

cordelli

I don't think it will ruin the company. Most people don't even have a clue as to all the cruise lines under the Carnival umbrella, they think it's just carnival and not common management across the other lines.

While carnival may lose a few people, most of their customer base won't care.

As Carnival said on Frday

booking volume since January for the rest of the year has been "running significantly higher than last year at slightly higher prices," the company said.

sonofzeus

Terrific. But I still wouldn't buy their shares:

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/ccl

chollie

Nobody ever really thinks it will happen to them.

And, as the folks I work with say (cruises are the most popular family/couples vacation), if something does go wrong, they're planning on suing and making big $$. I suspect it might not be quite that simple legally, but it's what my co-workers think.

cordelli

Yeah, because everybody who has been involved in previous carnival disasters have all sued and made big bucks.

It's why carnival will never go under, there's an endless supply of clueless people who will buy tickets.

will5404

So your argument is the whole industry is this bad the media is just picking on Carnival? Duly noted...

On the plus side, Carnival could make back some of their loses if they host a reality TV show on one of their stricken cruise liners. They could probably slip a waiver somewhere in the booking process.

tmpcase

A propeller problem on P&O Ventura ship sailing a Transatlantic cruise Barbados to Southampton resulted in reduced speed and itinerary change (see this http://www.shipcruise.org/po-ventura-itinerary/ for dates, prices and current position) this incident won't change the P and O Ventura schedule for 2013 (cruises from Southampton to Mediterranean, Baltic, Norway Fjords, Canary Islands). It's really sad that it is another Carnival ship - ms Ventura belongs to the fleet of P&O Cruises - a brand of Carnival Corp

DanJ

Not really saying the industry is "this bad". Splendor and Triumph fires are bad. The Dream was an over reaction based on the Triumph. The Legend doesn't even rate a mention in the news. In the latter 2, it's just "crap happens" on complex pieces of machinery that are in constant use.

cordelli

If Carnival doesn't want people to keep hearing about their problems, they need to implement something to prevent the problems from happening.

The assumption that all lines experience this kind of catastrophic failures as often as Carnival has, and somehow the the cruise line gets the press not to cover it and the people on board not to say a word about it, and they cancel months of cruises and nobody knows about it is just a wee bit crazy.

The news always works the same way. One major incident, and everything from that point on even remotely related to it is news. Given the horrible way the first one was handled, Carnival will be under the news spotlight for a long time every time a light bulb burns out.

wrp96

A coworker was onboard Dream. She said the biggest issue they had, in fact really the only issue, was the lack of communication. After the initial announcement that there was an issue right after they got back on ship from the port call, they heard very little until midday the next day.

Otherwise she felt they were treated well.

piper28

The Dream incident I think was really blown up beyond what the situation really was. For that one, the reality was, they were doing what they were supposed to do, ie, testing the backup generator, and the failover for that failed. Because of that, they couldn't sail because they couldn't rely on the backup generator. This is a standard test they do on all the cruise ships, and they do it in port specifically in case of this type of failure. I don't know how big of a news situation it would have been if not for the Triumph. But I do know that it's far better that they run these tests to discover a problem before needing to rely on that and finding out in a bad situation at there's a problem.

The propulsion problems that have been reported where they had to slow this ships down are a dime a dozen. If you read through cruise critic, I think you're going to find that these are far more common than people realize. It's just against the background of the Triumph that it's suddenly a news issue. I know back when I first starting taking cruises, Celebrity was having a large number of problems with their azipod systems, and the Infinity especially was having it's Alaska season messed up pretty bad.

Heck, right now apparently the Regent Seven Seas Voyager is having propulsion problems, but you don't see that in the news much because it's not Carnival owned.

sonofzeus

Link?

Letitride3c

Checking cruisecritic website - indirect source reporting some sort of propulsion problem - ship is somewhere in the East or South China Sea, away/toward Xiamen (departed Hong Kong ??) and heading toward Shanghai

http://boards.cruisecritic.com/showthread.php?t=1809976

News sources based in/with strong presence in Asia, including BBC, should be picking up the news story already or soon