Could the Era of International Travel Be Gone So Soon?

 

Perhaps like many people you have concerns about booking a cruise, given the Coronavirus epidemic that seems to be sweeping the world.  

 

Your angst is quite understandable, especially if you're concerned about being quarantined on a cruise ship, which seems to be on TV every time I look. 

 

 

In reality thus far, two Princess ships --- out of 278 cruise ships registered with CLIA --- have now been quarantined.

 

Diamond Princess was traveling through Asia and is a cruise that attracts a large contingent of Chinese citizens, and Grand Princess was a cruise very much like the one I've taken three times from LA, but in this case between San Francisco and Hawaii.

 

If you have someone from your home town who just returned from being trapped in a cruise ship room, it is a big story in papers as well as town gossip.  It would be quite an ordeal, though I'd say a bit less than, for example, the conditions faced by the crew of Shackleton's Endurance Expedition in Antarctica.

 

The Cononavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China, and counter-measures by the United States government in particular has become quite a fascinating experiment in epidemiology that could answer questions of how a disease on the magnitude of a killer plague might be countered.

 

Dan Brown's "Inferno" features a fictional deadly disaster on a global scale planned by an evil genius, and the steps Robert Langdon takes to stop it hopefully will never really be necessary.

 

 

The actual counter comes in moderate steps, as we've proven in the past with other diseases like swine flu or bird flu, though our government seems much more aggressive this time and has been cheered on by the loyal opposition to be even more extreme.

 

The biggest concern I hear from actual cruisers is getting stuck on a ship, which seems to be the focus in many news stories about Coronavirus.  That is resulting in a lot of cancellations for March and April.

 

Shouldn't the focus more properly be on nursing homes?

 

Perhaps the government should be evacuating all nursing homes, because those have proven to be among the most deadly places in the USA, both during this Coronavirus moment and throughout past few decades.  Mortality rates are quite high in nursing homes compared to on cruises or the population at large, both in terms of Coronavirus and in general.

I assume like every other crisis, Coronavirus will eventually blow over.  9/11, the hurricane that hit New Orleans or the Bahamas or Puerto Rico, the occasional Norovirus outbreak, the Nuclear War with North Korea that never happened, the Syrian refugee crisis, the big depression at the start of the last decade, terrorism in the UK or Boston... everything eventually gets put into perspective, and we move on. 

 

However, we currently have a very influential government player, physician Dr. Fauci, who as a 79-year-old himself has taken it as his personal mission to stop all senior citizens from taking cruises.  With seemingly all media hyping the disease and the ship quarantines, this Coronavirus may well become associated with the cruise industry much like the Norovirus, even if it proves to be more prominent in the general public than on cruise ships.  

 

Based on pricing I am seeing for cruises beyond three months out, the cruise lines expect the scare-level to be greatly diminished by summer, because prices are holding pretty strong for that prime travel season when kids are out of school.  Cruise lines will eventually have to make up the lost revenue somehow.  Of course, they may or may not be good soothsayers in this case, even if they have seemed like oracles in predicting what cruisers want.  

 

My guess is that cruise lines will accelerate the trend to add more amenities at increased prices, probably diminishing the discount senior rates and other stripped cruise-only deals that bring on a lot of older folks on limited, fixed budgets, and instead focus on younger people with more flexible budgets and future prospects.

 

 

Cruising has been a great way for the average American to see the world, but maybe retired people will begin to spend more time at home and free up room on cruise ships for younger people.

 

I know that Virgin Voyages, for example, sees that younger coterie to be a potential niche, and founder Richard Branson has proven to be pretty good at finding entrepreneurial trends to ride.   He understands shorter cruises appeal to working people with limited time off.

 

Only about 15% of Americans could be called "Cruisers."  Even among "Travelers," most have never taken a cruise.  It's not unusual for Cruisers to take a trip every year, or several times a year.  There's no doubt that currently lots of Cruisers are seniors, because we have the time and money to cruise.

 

I don't think most of us expect to live forever, but we're also not in a hurry to die, so we will each internalize what we hear about Coronavirus and other crises that will inevitably unfold in coming years to make our own decisions as to whether to journey in uncertain times.  In this age of 24-hour cable news hoping to draw viewers with sensationalist headlines, will there ever be "certain times" again?  I just can't believe the era of international travel for the average American could be drawing to a close so soon.