In the last eleven months since I launched Cruise Law News (CLN), I have written what I thought were thoughtful and carefully researched articles about the cruise industry. But most of my most favorite blogs about the most important issues facing cruise passengers received little feedback and only a few hundred readers.
I have found that my most popular blogs involved cruise ship disasters.
That’s right. Terror. Fear. Panic.
When I was a kid the box office hits included movies like the Poseidon Adventure and Towering Inferno. Thirty years later, my kids were raised on Titanic and Cloverfield.
So it should be no surprise that one of my most popular blogs over the last year involved an incident where Carnival’s Ecstasy cruise ship made a violent turn in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico which emptied the swimming pool on the Lido deck, injured 60 passengers, and terrorized the remaining 2,000 passengers who feared that the cruise ship was about to tilt over and they were going to die.
Carnival claimed that the cruise ship made an evasive maneuver to avoid a loose buoy. But the passengers tell a different story. Take a moment and read the comments to Did Carnival’s Ecstasy Cruise Ship Almost Hit A Sand Bar?
In addition to my blog, I have a YouTube page called, obviously enough, “Cruise Law,” where I post cruise videos. The most popular video is “Wave Hits Louis Majesty Cruise Ship.” A huge wave smashes into the cruise ship’s bay windows, killing passengers and flooding the ship. Over 86,000 people have viewed the video since March.
Yes, the video is terrifying.
Exactly what most Americans raised-on-disaster-movies are looking for. Today, we are living in a iReport society where CNN, MSNBC and FOX News regularly broadcast iPhone videos of fires, floods, and bedlam.
One of the most popular cruise videos on YouTube shows a cruise ship being tossed around in a storm. It looks like the cruise ship is about to tip over at any moment. The video has over 2,500,000 views. Take a look below and you can see why it is so popular.
There will be many stories in the future where cruise ships catch on fire, sink or are hijacked by terrorists. The cruise lines will frantically try and suppress the images and assure the public that everything is OK. But YouTube will be there to reveal the truth. And everyone will be watching the disaster.
Video credit: CrystalBeast123