Carnival Cruise line will use its ships to return crew members home.
The cruise line says eighteen Carnival ships will rendezvous in the Bahamas over the next several days. From there, nine ships will be used to bring home healthy crewmembers who remain onboard due to restrictions on air travel to Asia, Africa, Europe, India, and Latin America.
A media release from Carnival Cruise Line says “The ships have been at various U.S. homeports provisioning supplies and bunkering fuel for their journeys. Certain crew will join ships using water shuttles off the coast of The Bahamas. Once completed, nine ships will sail to their destinations with crew members from North American-based ships on board. The remaining nine ships will spend most of their time in anchorage positions in The Bahamas or Panama and eventually all ships will reduce their crew numbers to safe operational manning levels.”
Christine Duffy, president of Carnival Cruise Line says, “The safety and well-being of our team members continue to be a top priority. Given the pause in our operations, we are committed to getting our crew members safely home to their families. We sincerely thank them for their hard work, patience, and understanding during this process. We would also like to thank the government of The Bahamas for their support of this operation, as well as the CDC, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and local port agencies.”
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Carnival says the crewmembers who will be traveling home have been clear and deemed healthy by the ship's medical team.
Earlier this month, Carnival Cruise ship Valor was ordered to anchor at the Port of New Orleans where 300 healthy crewmembers disembarked so they could return home.
Carnival stopped all cruise operations and anchored its fleet of 27 ships on March 13th. Since then, the cruise line says it had already helped return home 10,000 of its 29,000 crew members.
