The new president of the Cruise Line International Association (CLIA), Thomas Ostebo, unexpectedly left his new job amidst claims by CLIA that he departed for unexplained "personal reasons."
Mr. Ostebo retired from the U.S. Coast Guard as a rear admiral before joining CLIA. He joined CLIA with great fanfare.
CLIA Chairman and president of
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The U.S. Department of State issued another warning to U.S. citizens that crime and violence in El Salvador continue to be at high levels. U.S. citizens traveling to El Salvador should remain alert to their surroundings. This travel warning supersedes the last warning (November 21, 2014).
Since January 2010, 34 U.S. citizens have been murdered
Security failed the tourists from the Costa and MSC cruise ships visiting Tunisia last week. The result: 17 dead cruise passengers and two dozen injured.
Tunisia acknowledges it. The risk of jihadists attacking tourists was readily foreseeable. Security analysts and security forces blew it.
In response to this failure, Tunisia fired the country’s leading security
The cruise industry’s favorite publication, Travel Weekly, just published an article titled After Tunis attack, Impact on Cruise Sales Pondered.
The article speculates whether cruise sales will drop following the Islamic State’s massacre of cruise passenger’s in Tunis last week.
In the last couple of years, first quarter "wave" sales were negatively impacted by
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The Miami Herald published an interesting article last week entitled Watch Out for the Fine Print, a well written and researched article by prominent Miami maritime lawyers Robert Peltz and Carol Finklehoffe. It explains how cruise lines strip the rights of U.S. consumers by burying exculpatory fine print in the cruise line tickets. It’s
I was sitting in Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport this morning when I read a travel publication’s headline that Christine Duffy was just named president of Carnival Cruise Lines. Reading the headlines made me feel like I was having an out-of-body experience.
Christine Duffy president of Carnival?
I stopped for a moment and thought, is today
The Friends of the Earth (FOE) non-profit organization just released its "Cruise Ship Report Card" for 2014. In a press release, the FOE states that "cruise ships dumped more than a billion gallons of sewage in the ocean this year, much of it raw or poorly treated . . "
The amount of raw
The cruise industry finally instituted Ebola-specific protocols after the highly publicized incident yesterday when a healthcare worker from Dallas was discovered to be on a Carnival cruise to the Caribbean.
TravelPulse published an article discussing the new protocols Cruise Industry Adopts Stricter Ebola Screenings.
Cruise lines like Carnival are finally asking cruise passengers whether
Christine Duffy, the CEO of the cruise industry trade group Cruise Line International Association (CLIA), has authored an article entitled "CDC report debunks norovirus cruise myth."
The article was first issued as a press release and later picked up by cruise cheerleaders like Cruise Critic. Travel Weekly is the latest travel publication to
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is beginning a two-day meeting today in Washington D.C. regarding the topic of passenger safety aboard cruise ships. The meeting was requested and largely organized by the Cruise Line International Association (CLIA), the trade group for the cruise lines, to showcase the cruise industry.
Participating in the meeting will
After the Costa Concordia capsized, travel agents began telling their clients that such incidents were "rare" and that cruising was "absolutely safe." Some travel agents went as far as to claim that the last time a cruise ship sank was over a 100 years ago when the Titanic struck an iceberg.
Of course this was
Following the horrific crime perpetrated by the Holland America Line crew member against the passenger on the Nieuw Amsterdam cruise ship on Valentine’s Day, the cruise industry is pulling out all of the stops to convince the public that the cruise lines carefully screens their employees.
But it’s not true.
Cruise lines don’t vet their
The news of 600 passengers and crew members stricken with what appears to be norovirus is dominating the cruise news today. The story broke on Friday with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announcing that a little over 300 passenger and crew aboard the Explorer of the Seas were suffering from nausea and diarrhea.
The
With 2013 ending, I’ve gone back over the 400 articles I have written this year to determine which one was the most popular.
The winner, by a landslide, was What Cruise Lines Don’t Want You to Know.
I wrote this article in February, ten days after the Carnival Triumph became forever known as the
Travel Weekly recently published an article titled "Lax Regulations of Cruise Lines is a Myth."
I’m used to reading articles from Travel Weekly which lean over backwards to be nice to the cruise lines. After all, Travel Weekly is a travel magazine which caters to people who love to cruise and travel around
Travel Weekly published a rather fascinating interview by Arnie Weissmann of the CEO of the Cruise Line International Association (CLIA), Christine Duffy, entitled "Cruising at a Crossroads."
Over the past eight years, there have been eight Congressional hearings on important issues which have plagued the cruise industry, such as the suspicious disappearances of
The Florida Today newspaper published two articles today about the issue of sexual assault of passengers and whether cruise lines conduct background checks of their cruise ship employees.
The issue of background checks is a rather interesting topic. But it’s an issue the cruise lines hate to talk about.
Six weeks ago, I attended
Late yesterday afternoon the cruise industry’s trade organization, Cruise Line International Association (CLIA), announced in a press release that it was adopting a cruise passenger "Bill of Rights."
The "Bill of Rights" is primarily a reaction to the adverse publicity following the Triumph "cruise from hell" stories where passengers were stuck on the disabled and
