Loose Lips

A couple of weeks ago when Diamond Princess was docking at Victoria, it sustained some minor damage to its starboard propeller. The damaged areas were smoothed out by divers during its turnaround the next day at Seattle. No immediate drydock was necessary for the repair, and there is no effect on the itinerary or the safety of the passengers.

Yet, there’s more to the situation, and it points up a quandary cruise lines often face: How much do they talk about, and how soon do they start talking about it?

In this case, the situation is that at some point, Princess wants to replace that propeller so the ship will operate at its optimum performance. That type of repair needs to be done in drydock, and may - and we stress may - require a cancellation of one sailing. Then again it may not.

Because the need for maintenance on the ship isn’t pressing, it can be scheduled any time there’s drydock space available and Princess decides that the ship could be out of service. That gives Princess a lot of room to maneuver, a lot of time to consider the possibilities, and believe it or not, that creates its own problem for the company.

Just so everyone is on the same page, it’s kind of like the situation I find myself in with my car. My air conditioning isn’t working very well, and it needs go in for service. I can live with it the way it is for a while, so I have to find out when the garage will be able to do the work, when I can arrange transportation to and from the garage, and then decide when it’s most convenient (or is that least inconvenient?) to do without the car for a day or two.

So Princess right now is in that same mode. They’ve been contacting shipyards in several areas which are equipped to do the work on Diamond Princess, and they’re checking schedules of when the yards have availability. They also are thinking about when they most easily do without the ship for a week.

The optimum time to do the work from the standpoint of availability of the ship is when its scheduled for a wetdock in early December. The ship would already be out of service, so no one’s vacation plans would be disrupted. That would mean, however, that they need different facilities (a drydock instead of a wetdock), and could they get them at the same time in same area? (The ship will be in Southern California by then.) In case that idea doesn’t workout, they are also checking a whole range of dates with various yards in Northwest with the idea of scheduling the ship at a time when it would cause the least disruption for the fewest number of passengers. Anyway, you can see how fluid the situation is, especially now when they are just beginning to explore the possibilities.

So here’s the ethical dilemma in which cruise lines constantly find themselves: When should they let it be known to passengers and potential passengers that they may have to cancel one sailing?

On the one hand, they want to be ethical with their customers and give them as much notice as they can about a change in their vacation plans. But on the other hand, rushing that information out there can come at a very high price to both the cruise line and the passengers.

How? This repair could result in a canceled sailing any given from now for the next year, or theoretically, even farther. Almost everyone who has a booking on the ship any time in the future is going to wonder if they are going to be affected. Some may even change their plans as soon as they hear of the potential based on this remote possibility that it would cancel their sailing. From the profit potential, it’s going to depress new bookings on the ship, since many people would choose another ship where there isn’t the uncertainty.

Note that I said "remote possibility" that any one specific sailing would be canceled. That’s because it will affect one and only one sailing - or maybe NO sailing - if they can arrange the work in December when the ship is already scheduled to be idle.

If that’s the case (that they can schedule it so it doesn’t affect any cruises), the customers who have booked the ship never really needed to know about it. So if they rushed the information out there too soon (about considering taking the ship out of service for a week), not only would they have needlessly upset literally tens of thousands of customers who had booked the ship on a variety of dates, but they also would have lost millions of dollars of potential business.

Now before you think, "Yes, but how often does this really happen?" It is happening constantly, but you just don’t know about it. Cruise lines are constantly negotiating charter contracts which may take ships out of regular service for a week or two, but most of those don’t actually result in a charter. Beyond that, there are often maintenance issues which cause lines to consider the same type of scenario as the example we used above, and most of the time, these don’t result any canceled sailings.

For that reason, cruise lines have pretty much adopted the policy of not talking about these things until they are definitely going to happen on a specific date.

So you’re probably wondering why Princess is letting us use the situation with Diamond Princess as our example for this article. As you can imagine, lots of people know part of the story as the process unfolds. There are only a limited number of people at the cruise line who know, but there are people at each of the yards contacted about availability.

In this case, one of the people at one of the yards, not realizing the implications of releasing the information, told someone in Victoria, and that person talked to the local news media about it. A cruise ship canceling a call is a story of considerable interest in a smaller port city. Each canceled call means a sizeable amount of cash lost that would be spent by the cruise line as well as the passengers who would have gone ashore.

The yard that gave that person the information, only knew that Princess was checking a variety of dates with them for availability, and didn’t know the other major part of the issue: the date Princess really wants would be in December when the ship has returned to California and it is already scheduled to be out of service for a few days. So that individual just reported that Princess was shopping for drydock dates for Diamond Princess at an area yard during the time when the ship was in the Northwest.

The effects of that early announcement can already be seen. Online, there has already been lots of verbal hand-wringing and speculating about which sailing would likely be canceled and should they change their sailing date and so forth. Many have also expressed how this would upset their lives. The problem here is that none of them knew (until now) that there’s a strong possibility that no sailings will be canceled.

So Princess knows that part of the story is out there now, and since CND asked about it, they filled us in on the whole story in hopes that it will possibly ease the concern of some customers who are thinking their cruise may be canceled.

In the process, our readers got to learn about one of the ethical dilemmas cruise lines face behind the scenes all the time. And we also get to update the WWII adage, to say that loose lips cause needless concern and cost lots of money.

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