Sapphire PrincessThe Shanghai Daily newspaper reports today that a cruise passenger went overboard from Princess Cruises’ Sapphire Princess cruise ship this weekend after the ship departed from Shanghai and was heading to Japan.

The newspaper says that the the woman last seen at 7 P.M. on Saturday.

The newspaper further states that the woman was confirmed missing

Sapphire PrincessInstead of hiring trained lifeguards in response to the drownings on the Sapphire Princess, Princess has tasked bartenders, dishwashers, and other crew members to add an hour of work each day to being "pool monitors" or "pool rovers".

The U.K.’s Maritime Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) recently criticized Princess after a passenger drowned on the Sapphire Princess.

A year ago, I wrote about a passenger drowning on the Princess Sapphire Princess. The passenger’s death is just one of many mishaps where cruise passengers were killed or seriously injured in a lifeguard-less swimming pool on a Carnival, Disney, NCL, Princess and Royal Caribbean cruise ship.

Princess responded to our request for a

A newspaper in Shanghai, the Shanghaist, reports that an eight-year-old girl is in critical condition after being found unconscious in the swimming pool of a Princess cruise ship last week.

The child and her mother, both from Shanghai, reportedly sailed on the Sapphire Princess, scheduled to call on ports in Japan and South

The Shanghai Daily reports that a passenger on a cruise from Shanghai was found dead in one of the cruise ship’s pools.

The newspaper says that Princess Cruises confirmed the death of the 29-year-old woman onboard the Sapphire Princess cruise ship. 

"It is thought that she drowned," according to the newspaper.

The cruise reportedly left Shanghai for

A Seattle news station King5.com reports today that norovirus sickened 100 people on Princess Cruises’ Sapphire Princess cruise ship based in Seattle. 

As we have reported in prior blogs,  the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) concludes that whereas "person to person" transmission of norovirus has been documented, "norwalk gastroenteritis is transmitted by the fecal-oral route via contaminated water and

I’ll admit it.  David Foster Wallace’s "A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again" is one of the funniest, albeit most cynical, books ever written about the cruise industry.  So when I read Benjamin Errett’s recent article in Canada’s National Post entitled "The Indignity of Weak Coffee – A Deeply Cynical Account of an Alaskan Cruise," I

Neighbors of Ms. Edelgard Carney who disappeared from the Princess Cruises’ Sapphire Princess indicate that she never intended to return home once she left California.  

Vancouverite, a newspaper in Vancouver, Canada, reports that Ms. Carney sold her $300,000 house to the Catholic Church for just $125,000, left her furniture and disposed of her personal belongings.  

The U.S. Coast Guard is now reporting that the missing California passenger, Ms. Edelgard Carney, went overboard at 6:08 a.m. Tuesday, 200 miles south of Ketchikan.  An announcement with such a specific time obviously means that there are closed circuit surveillance tapes which captured images which precisely document the time the passenger went overboard.

Previously, news sources reported that Ms. Carney disappeared on