Cruise giant Carnival to repatriate its entire stranded Indian crew by early July

Luxury cruise liners owned by Carnival Cruise Line has never called at Indian ports as part of their itinerary. Yet, this week, four such huge floating luxury hotels will visit Mumbai Port, one by one, not to take passengers but to drop off thousands of Indian crew stranded on board since February after the coronavirus threw normal life out of gear.

This is part of a plan by Carnival Corporation & plc, the world’s largest leisure travel company, to repatriate about 7,000 crew stranded on board its luxury fleet to India by early July using a combination of cruise ships and chartered flights, the managing director of the company’s Indian unit has said.

‘Veendam’, a cruise ship operated by Holland America Line, a unit of Carnival, called at Cochin Port on Friday to disembark 130 Indian seafarers.

‘Carnival Splendor’, another luxury liner owned by Carnival Corporation, arrived at Mumbai Port on Saturday, while three more - ‘Carnival Ecstasy’, “Carnival Liberty’ and ‘Carnival Fascination’ - are expected to reach Mumbai Port this week.

“Between the three of them, we will disembark about 3,500 Indian crew,” said Prasad Hariharan, managing director of Carnival Support Services India Pvt Ltd, the wholly-owned Indian unit of Florida-based Carnival Corporation.

Some 22,000 Indians are working on the eight cruise brands owned by the New York and London stock exchanges-listed Carnival Corporation, making up the second largest workforce by nationality for the cruise giant after Filipinos.

Carnival’s Indian crew hails from all over the country, but a bigger chunk comes from Maharashtra, Gujarat, Kerala, Goa and the North Eastern states.

When the pandemic hit the globe in February, some 13,000 Indians were on board the 100 cruise ships run by Carnival Corporation. Of these, about 5,500 Indians have been repatriated to India mainly on some 15 chartered flights since the middle of May.

The remaining crew will be brought back by end June or early July, Prasad said.

Carnival’s crew on board belonged to more than 60 different nationalities. As nations closed borders and stopped international flights, the cruise line operator had a “big challenge” on its hands to send the crew back to their home countries after it “paused” cruising operations, disembarked all passengers and decided “not to do business for quite some time”.

Carnival, Prasad said, made sure that the stranded crew were kept on board in a manner without affecting them while ensuring social distancing. “The crews were given independent, passenger cabins,” he said.

The company then started exploring options to repatriate the crew belonging to 60 different nationalities.

With India opening up for charter flights in May, Carnival ran over 15 special flights to Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Kochi, Goa and Mumbai to bring back more than 5,500 Indians.

“We are now looking at ships to repatriate the crew,” Prasad said. “To get a ship from the US, all the way to India only to disembark crew, takes a lot of planning. It’s not a commercial trip. It’s like doing a world cruise,” he said.

Carnival has hired some 35 buses to move the crew who will get off the ‘Splendor’ to different parts of the country. It is also planning a charter flight to ferry the crew from Mumbai to Kolkata, Guwahati and Imphal.

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