Yesterday CNN aired a special program about the "hide and seek" games which crew members were ordered to play on the Silver Shadow cruise ship, where the ship routinely hid trolleys of food items in crew members cabins to avoid detection by sanitation inspectors of the U.S. Public Health Department.

Our little blog was the first to cover the story ten days ago in our article Silver Shadow Fails Sanitation Inspection After Caught Hiding Filthy Conditions from Health Inspectors

You can see the photos of the cruise line’s filthy practice on our Facebook page here.

Silver Shadow Silversea Cruises SanitationBefore we published our article, we contacted several people at Silversea Cruises to discuss the matter but no one would respond.  Its seems like the cruise line thought it could just ignore the problem and it would go away. Quite frankly this is the holier-than-thou attitude of many cruise lines which think that they can do anything with impunity.

The story was mentioned extensively not only on CNN, but is being discussed on other networks (Peter Greenberg was talking about the issue on CBS this morning) as well as being mentioned in newspapers and online travel travel boards. 

The comments to the CNN article are spilling over from Silversea Cruises to the cruise industry at large.

The story comes at a key time while the Senate debates enacting legislation to more aggressively regulate the cruise industry. Yesterday Senator Rockefeller convened a hearing where he announced that he is enacting legislation to provide consumers greater protection while on cruise ships. 

Watch the video below.  Its disappointing to see that the cruise line faced no real consequence after the CDC caught it intentionally gaming the system. Remember it was crew members who exposed the cover up, not the CDC by itself. And the CDC really didn’t do anything except tell the cruise ship not to do it again.

Why wasn’t the ship detained in port?  Why wasn’t the cruise line fined?