Cruise lines facing months of disruptions

Itineraries reworked to avoid decimated Caribbean islands

The cruise industry dodged a bullet Sunday when Hurricane Irma came ashore along the west coast of Florida. A trajectory 100 miles to the east could have put the storm in line to devastate the world’s three biggest cruise hubs — Port Miami, Fort Lauderdale’s Port Everglades and Port Canaveral.

But even as normal operations out of the three ports quickly resumed, the world’s major cruise lines face months of disruptions to itineraries that include stops at eastern Caribbean islands that Irma hit hard.

Norwegian Cruise Line announced it was replacing all eastern Caribbean sailings with western Caribbean sailings through at least November.

Norwegian’s eastern Caribbean voyages — offered out of Miami on a single ship, the 4,248-passenger Norwegian Escape — traditionally feature a stop in St. Thomas, which has suffered catastrophic damage. The trips include a visit to nearby Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, which was devastated by Irma.

Royal Caribbean said its ships won’t be able to visit Irma-ravaged St. Thomas, St. Martin or Key West for some time, although it didn’t give an outlook on how long they might stay away.

Royal Caribbean ships regularly dock on the Dutch side of the island of St. Martin, also known as St. Maarten. “Given Hurricane Irma’s impact to St. Maarten, St. Thomas and Key West, we will be working on (finding) alternative ports for future sailings until these islands have fully recovered,” Royal Caribbean said Monday in a travel alert on its website.

St. Thomas and St. Martin are two of the Caribbean destinations most visited by cruise ships and integral to dozens of cruise itineraries. Each draws more than 1.6 million passengers per year.

In the Caribbean and the Bahamas, only a handful of ports come close to drawing as many passengers. In addition to St. Thomas, St. Martin, Tortola and Key West, cruise ship destinations significantly affected by Irma include St. John, Barbuda, St. Barts and Cuba. The latter had only recently opened to U.S.based cruise ships.

It was a widely spread blow that stunned even longtime industry watchers.

“This is unprecedented to have so many Caribbean islands devastated all at once,” Mike Driscoll, editor of Cruise Week, told USA TODAY. “In the past, it has been one or two islands at once knocked out temporarily by a big storm. This is different in scale.”

Driscoll said that although it’s early days in the recovery effort on hard-hit Caribbean islands, it looks like a massive amount of work will be needed to help them recover to the point where cruise ships can return — work that could take an extended period.

“The basic message potential Caribbean vacationers heard this past week was that the Caribbean was devastated,” Driscoll said. “That could cause a lot of people to put off taking a Caribbean cruise.”

“This is unprecedented to have so many Caribbean islands devastated all at once.” Mike Driscoll, editor of Cruise Week

CHRISTOPHE ENA, AP Hurricane Irma laid waste to many of the buildings on the Caribbean island of St. Martin.