With the Australian government experiencing increasing pressure from the beleaguered cruise industry, which has proposed some very strong international standard based protocols and inter and intra state cruising, to allow cruising to restart to avoid many more billions of Aussie dollars being lost from the economy, I took the opportunity to have a chat with Joel Katz, CEO of CLIA, Cruise Lines International Australia to discover what is really going on in the world of getting Aussies back cruising and believe me, the amount of work going on is massive!
Among the very interesting things Joel told me is while 17 December is a critical date in the COVID-19 calendar, when announcements regarding the review of current restrictions on cruising, nobody should expect an immediate return to cruising for a number for some very valid reasons.
We have to remember that the ships are in warm lay up with may in the Philippines because we all need to remember Australia “kicked” them all out!
As a result it will take time to get them up and running, get the crew employed and trained the crew in the new protocols and also the repositioning of the ships to Australia and much more I imagine!
So realistically Joel Katz does not expect Aussies to be cruising before say the end of February and then it will be a phased approach, under the new protocols that CLIA have provided and also only inter or intra state cruises.
In the meantime, check out my chat with Joel today and discover the current cruise start position by clicking on the box below.
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