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While MS Zaandam was hiding off the coast of Florida, Mateo lay down in his cabin and recorded videos for his children. I wanted them to be the most productive for birthdays that could be missed. It reminded them of their eternal love. An outbreak of COVID-19 had ravaged the cruiser he worked on, making many passengers and crew sick, now Matthew felt bad and remained confined to his cabin.
During his decade in the cruise industry, Matthew said he had never felt so dead.
However, the cruiser told his circle of relatives not to worry, confident that he would struggle to get home, but Matthew also filmed his farewell on his phone, in case he could not keep that promise.
The old cruise line has been serving consumers on luxury boats for over a decade. His genuine call is not Matthew,After verifying the identity of the worker, Business Insider decided to keep his call genuine to avoid retaliation.
Matthew hoped that the South American Zaandam would take position like all the similar cruisers he had worked on, even with news of a new virulent virus spreading outside China’s Wuhan Province and infecting passengers and the Diamond Princess and Grand Princess team, the cruise ship worker said he trusted his employer , Carnival Corp.
From the early days of Zaandam’s journey, team members were told to chemically disinfect chairs, tables and other surfaces, an additional precaution. Mateo stated that the team had won any additional masks or non-public protective equipment.
All of Matthew’s confidence in the carnival evaporated for about a week on the zaandam’s journey, when team members began to get sick. Mateo said he was alarmed by the obvious unhooking of zaandam’s executive component Holland America and the line’s parent company, Carnival, acting.
“I said to my colleagues, “That’s absolutely wrong, ” he said. “Why don’t you announce that the coronavirus is on board?”
At the time, he claimed that he had begun to realize a replacement in the team’s behavior left in the paintings after the teacher ordered visitors to move to their official rooms.
Novices and veterans, young and old, all had the same expression: a pinched and frightened look. None of the team members, adding Matthew, sought to report to the paintings in the ship’s dining room as the fever traveled through the ship’s decks. they did, as did colleagues who began to show symptoms of COVID-19: cough, fainting and fever.
“It’s like a war, ” said Matthew, like a real war. “
Matthew’s not dead. But “a big housekeeper” named Wiwit Widarto did so after being rushed to a Florida hospital. Four passengers also lost their lives on the journey, although it is unclear whether they all died of COVID-19. Matthew said he would never paint for Holland.
“They didn’t care about the team or the guests,” he said.
Carnival is the largest cruise line. With nine iconic cruise lines and a market percentage of nearly 40% in 2018, Carnival Corp. was in reserve for a booming 2020. Earlier this year, the company had just made a profit of $3 billion (good for a margin profit of 14%): its fourth consecutive year with a profit margin of at least 14%.
Six months later, the dream of another record year for Carnival is dead and its predictable long run seems bleak Since it hit the pandemic, the company has faced a mix of layoffs, licensing cuts and wages, and has stayed to sell several of its long-standing cruise ships and spouse with rivals of the time. In addition, he is also under scrutiny on how he controlled COVID-19 outbreaks on his ships.
“As a cruise company, they were meant to protect team members and guests,” Matthew said. “Never to us. “
The precautionary sign reached Princess Cruises inboxes on February 1, a representative of Hong Kong Harbor wrote to the cruise line telling them that a passenger had tested positive for COVID-19 after leaving the shipment in Hong Kong, the New York Times reported. The port manager begged Princess Cruises to “please notify the shipping-related parties and continue disinfection,” the Times reported.
It was more than a month before the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a pandemic. Cruisers had faced episodes of norovirus for a long time.
The company’s account of the initial reaction from Princess Cruises and its parent company, Carnival Corp. , was replaced when the complaint began to accumulate, according to Bloomberg. Princess continued her cruise on the Sea of Japan. Passengers piled up on the deck to enjoy the sun, sea air and poolside fun, shared meals with new friends at restaurants and piled up to watch the exhibits on board.
The aggregate continued for days, even after the captain arrived at the ship’s intercom to transmit the news of the disembarked passenger who had COVID-19.
Then, four days after Princess Cruises won her initial warning, the diamond princess captain ordered passengers to enter her rooms, the Washington Post reported.
At that time, the fever had spread across the ship, with many passengers positive for COVID-19. The number of patients would only increase from there, as would the number of deaths. Passengers would remain trapped in the shipment until March. 1. Hundreds of others have fallen ill, and at least thirteen other people have died from COVID-19, according to the Japanese Ministry of Health.
For some Carnival employees, the February 1 email was not the first sign of danger. Fears about the coronavirus have been on the rise since December, the fate of those aboard the Diamond Princess has highlighted the severity of the crisis for many.
But for a former businessman who worked in a technology-related role in Miami, it was the wonderful princess who evidently showed the magnitude of the pandemic.
“That’s when he hits us, ” he said. ” This is going to have a significant impact. “
The outbreak at the Grand Princess occurred on the February 11 cruise to Mexico, the shipment was quarantined in front of San Francisco for two weeks and at least 4 team members and passengers died, the Department of Health and Human Services told The Morning Call. passengers refused to be tested for the virus to expedite their return journey, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, which mentioned an official familiar with the evidence.
Epidemics in Diamond Princess and Grand Princess have led to more than 800 cases of COVID-19 and at least 10 deaths, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But it’s not the first time In March.
At one of Carnival’s workplaces in Doral, Florida, a former painter and subcontractor told Business Insider that they were involved because some colleagues had returned to the workplace from ships that had suffered COVID-19 outbreaks. It wasn’t until mid-March that Carnival said painters who can just paint from home.
“The movements of ship personnel towards the coast have been examined and tested much more closely,” said a former Carnival Corp employee.
Princess, shaken by the loss of life in the Diamond Princess and Grand Princess, announced in March that she would suspend her global operations for 60 days. Other cruise lines, owned by Carnival and others, followed suit temporarily. , the cruise industry had voluntarily closed its doors. In April, the U. S. government formalized this by banning cruise ships in U. S. waters for a hundred days.
But it just meant corporations weren’t starting new cruise ships.
The virus would leave Carnival and its competitors’ cruisers stranded for months, without passengers and equipment being able to disembark at ports to cause a new wave of COVID-19 outbreaks.
And from this fleet of stranded ships, Diamond Princess and Grand Princess were the only carnival ships to suffer fatal epidemics.
Behind Princess shipments, Holland America Line’s MS Zaandam was the high-profile shipment in Carnival’s fleet. After being banned at South American ports, the ship experienced a primary outbreak of COVID-19 on board. Four passengers and one team member died sending the trip and eventual disembarkation at Fort Lauderdale, Business Insider reported at the time.
Carnival and Holland America responded to the initial outbreak by sending MS Rotterdam to rescue zaandam’s healthy passengers once it became clear that the disease on board was COVID-19. Carnival also fought with various governments, adding the Panama Canal Authority, the South U. S. governments and the Florida state government and port government, to return passengers from Zaandam and Rotterdam to the United States.
But the total episode left many team members stranded and feeling used and in danger. The team aboard the Rotterdam told Business Insider that they had not been informed that they would be looking for potentially unhealthy visitors from Zaandam, who themselves were in danger. And if Carnival nevertheless controlled to convince the federal and Florida state governments to allow healthy passengers to leave the ship, it would be weeks before many members of the team would get similar relief.
Even the scenario aboard carnival ships without fatal cases of COVID-19 can still be bleak. On Holland America ships stranded at sea, team members had to purchase their own Internet access.
The chaos that spread on Carnival’s ships raised the option of monetary disaster, forcing the company to act temporarily to consolidate its money reserves.
By the end of November, Carnival had $518 million in money, enough to last less than a month without revenue, founded on the 2019 finish grades. By the end of February, that number had increased to $1. 3 billion, but widespread cancellations meant passengers were non-easy refunds to unusually higher grades, even though many of them accepted a credit for a long-term money cruise , while income fell.
To make matters worse, unlike the airline industry, cruise lines haven’t gotten any help from the US government. This probably didn’t help the fact that Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and Norwegian, the top 3 corporations. big in the sector, sign their businesses and ship abroad from the United States, in countries with lower tax rates and less strict labor laws.
“Government assistance for U. S. companies and the cruise industry has a tendency to be an offshore company,” said Paul Golding, macquarie Capital analyst covering the cruise industry (Macquarie owns carnival shares).
A Carnival representative said the company spent millions of dollars with US suppliers and distributors. But it’s not the first time And he had paid more than $700 million in taxes and fees in the US. But it’s not the first time In 2019. In its 2019 annual report, Carnival said it believed its north American cruise business was exempt from federal taxes. source of income imposed but not a source of income taxes.
As the coronavirus spread to the company’s ships and threatened its long-term navigation, Carnival operated lines of credit and sold justice and debt, but donations were given in favorable maximum terms for the company, as it sold shares at $8, only 15% of its value a year earlier, and bonds at an interest rate of 11. 5% , more than double the maximum of the company’s existing debt.
“They were in a liquidity crisis and a little nervous that this liquidity would run out if they didn’t throw it away,” said Morningstar inventory analyst Jaime Katz, covering the cruise industry. These fears have not come true, Added Katz. Carnival has announced since June about $4 billion in additional debt with interest rates between 8. 5% and 10. 5%.
In an interview with CNBC in April, CHIEF Arnold Donald reported that Carnival’s initial fundraising efforts had worked, saying the company had enough cash for the rest of the year with no revenue. But Carnival hasn’t finished looking at his finances.
In May, the company announced widespread layoffs, layoffs and pay cuts, a month after the salaries of sent employees were cut, despite Donald’s assurances in March that Carnival would not have to do so at least by the end of June. all parts of the company, adding Donald, who halved his salary for the remainder of 2020, and his control team, who saw his repayment reduced by 25% until the end of the year.
Carnival’s representative stated that the company has avoided layoffs and salary discounts for as long as it could be imagined and only used them when it became clear that its operations would not go general again during a prolonged era.
Movements don’t seem to give much confidence to investors. At the end of May 14, on the day the layoffs were announced, Carnival’s inventory was quoted at $12. 27 consistent with the stock, only $0. 01 more than the previous day, but below $54 the previous year.
The representative of Carnival stated that the company ultimately hoped to achieve double-digit yields on the invested capital it had obtained prior to the coronavirus, adding that this result tended to the company’s percentage price.
While investors may have doubts about Carnival’s ability to recover Donald’s record profits, the company is unlikely to seek a new leader to advise her during the post-Pandemic era, Katz said. He said, and Donald, like the CEOs of Royal Caribbean and Norwegian, is not guilty of the coronavirus.
“None of them are guilty of shutting down the industry through COVID-19, and they all seek to mitigate it in the most productive way imaginable,” Katz said. “I think it’s going to be hard to put that in the CEO’s account. “
The Carnival representative said Donald “will continue to play an important role in the company’s long-term success. “
In interviews with Axios, Bloomberg, The New York Times and CNBC, Donald has largely deflected criticism, or even the option that the company has made mistakes over the more than six months, describing the consequences of the pandemic as a historical crisis that Carnival has treated as well as expected.
“This is a generational global occasion, unprecedented,” Donald told Bloomberg in April. “Nothing is perfect, okay? They’ll say, “Wow, the things Carnival did well. These things, with a 20/20 setback, may have done better. “Array . . . We’re just a small component of genuine history. It drives us through it. “
Eight current and previous Carnival workers told Business Insider that they largely agreed with Donald’s characterization, saying the company had done its best to respond to a crisis for which no corporate or government company can be ready.
But four others raised questions about how Carnival might have allowed ships to sail in February and March when the severity of the pandemic arose.
“As soon as it came out, and as soon as other people began to refer to the closure of the borders, rather than just the final China, they interrupted all the crossings at the time,” said a former Holland America seller who compared Carnival’s ships to “Floating Petri Plates,” he said.
“You stopped then because if they had done that, there would not have been Princess Ruby, the wonderful princess, all the scares and the other people who stayed at sea for weeks. There wouldn’t have been any of that. The whole team would have been home. “
A Carnival Representative defended the company’s resolve to continue sailing, saying that in this period, another travel and entertainment bureaucracy continued to operate in much of the world.
Although Carnival has to wait several months for a full return to service, consumers don’t seem to leave the company altogether. Speaking in the company’s second-quarter earnings call in July, Carnival’s chief financial officer, David Bernstein, said bookings for 2021 cruise ships were “in historical ranges” at below-normal costs, despite Carnival’s resolve to avoid advertising. And about 45% of Carnival 2021 bookings came here from new customers, suggesting that the coronavirus hasn’t scared other people who have never been on a cruise before.
And Carnival, like other cruise lines like Disney and Royal Caribbean, has earned the determination of cruise enthusiasts, ordinary passengers who spend much of their holidays having fun on cruise ships.
But we don’t know how much longer Carnival will have to wait to resume service. Since Princess announced a two-month operational break in March, Carnival’s brands and competition have continually delayed their recoil dates as coronavirus cases continue to increase worldwide. The United States is the largest market in the cruise industry, and for now, it’s hard to say when the CDC cruise ban will be lifted, which ended in July until the end of September, Golding said.
“I’ll count on a giant component in the path of the virus,” he said.
While there is uncertainty about when Carnival will be able to return to general operations, neither the corporate or cruise industry is in danger of going bankrupt, said Bob Levinstein, CEO of CruiseCompete, an online page that allows cruise consumers to compare the costs presented. through agents. .
The Carnival logo and the institutional wisdom integrated into a workforce capable of managing the complex logistics involved in managing a cruise ship are priced enough for investors to be willing to continue financing the business, even if it still can’t navigate longer than expected. Levinstein told me in the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Donald said he was confident that Carnival could make it to the end of 2021 without any income.
“There’s a lot of cash to do in this business to make the company disappear,” Levinstein said.
But when cruise ships resume, they may look different. Carnival has thought about restricting the capacity of its ships when they are back in service, two resources close to the matter in the past told Business Insider. Y Holland America and Royal Caribbean could, at least temporarily, self-service buffets, according to an audio recording received through Business Insider and royal Caribbean’s CEO.
“We continue to work hard with the CDC and other fitness authorities, as well as science and medicine experts, on the advanced protocols needed when we restarted the cruise,” Carnival’s representative said. The representative added that there would be “a number of new protocols implemented” on an AIDA Cruises cruise scheduled for August 5, adding pre-shipment temperature controls, social distance measurements and more physically powerful cleaning procedures.
But many of the team members who survived the ship-scale COVID-19 epidemics hesitate to return to the sea and, although most of the thousands of pandemic-stranded team members have reached the coast, not everyone is home (Carnival’s representative said). that the company had repatriated more than 82,000 team members and was about to do the same with another 1,600 workers on the ship as of July 30).
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Matthew remains trapped in a country that is not his place of residence. The long-time cruise industry employee said Holland America’s attitude about his destiny seemed to be, “That’s your problem. “
After spending two weeks in quarantine at a hotel, he had to find accommodation to rent, for now he has to wait for his home country to lift restrictions before he could be reunited with his family.
“It turns out to be a long, long, long road,” he said.