This month marks the three year anniversary of my blog, Cruise Law News ("CLN").

I started this blog in September 2009 with the goal of writing about "everything the cruise lines don’t want you to know." There has been a lot to write about.

Shipboard rapes. Molestation of children. Mistreatment of foreign crew members. Overboard

The cruise industry trade organization, Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA), announced with great fanfare a new lifeboat training policy. This is a result of what CLIA is calling the cruise industry’s "operational safety review" after the Costa Concordia disaster. 

Every six months, the CLIA cruise ships will conduct lifeboat drills.  The lifeboats will be lowered

Cruise Passenger Burn Victim James BailyNewspapers in the U.K. and Australia are covering a horrific story involving a 28 year old man who was reportedly sailing on an Amsterdam "booze cruise" when he awoke in the ship’s bar on fire.

Cruise passenger James Bailey had what he describes as a "few drinks" and fell asleep in the cruise ship’s bar

Cruise List broke a story today about a power outage which occurred on Holland America Line’s  Statendam cruise ship last Thursday. 

The Cruise List blog explains that last Thursday evening his proprietary application which searches for cruise information on Twitter picked up a tweet about a “fuel pump explosion” that caused a “two hour Power Outage

Celebrity SolsticeWe received complaints from cruise passengers that there was a gastrointestinal outbreak on the Celebrity Solstice at the end of August. One cruise passenger contacted us and stated: 

"Our Celebrity Solstice cruise out of Barcelona on 8/27/12 had a huge outbreak of the norovirus. People were sick at the end of the cruise, however

Yesterday the first media source which reported that a cruise passenger went overboard from Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas was Cruise Critic.  Notwithstanding its name, Cruise Critic is not remotely a critic of the cruise industry.  It’s one of the cruise lines greatest fans and supporters. It will publish cruise line PR statements

Last night a young woman from Bartlett, Tennessee disappeared from the world’s largest cruise ship, the Allure of the Seas.

According to experts who track cruise ship disappearances, she was the 186th person to go overboard from a cruise ship in the last ten years.

At the time of the overboard last night, the

Bermuda Senior Magistrate Archibald Warner was again busy fining cruise tourists last week.

According to the Bermuda Sun, Magistrate Warner fined a Norwegian Star passenger on his honeymoon $800 after the local police used a sniffer canine to locate a few marijuana cigarettes (6 grams) in the passenger’s cabin while he and his newlywed

The disturbing trend of violence against the U.S. in places like Libya and Egypt is causing the cruise lines to scramble to swap out ports of call in North Africa for ports in Italy and Malta.

HAL’s Ryndam skipped a port Tunisia yesterday and instead visited Sardinia, Italy. Royal Caribbean’s Mariner of the Seas will avoid

A federal grand jury indicted a Florida man arrested for participating in and encouraging the gang rape of a 15 year old girl on a Carnival cruise ship last month. The grand jury indicted Casey Dickerson on sexual abuse charges Wednesday for engaging in the rape of a girl in a cabin on the Carnival Sensation