Are Cruise Ship Travelers at Risk From Pirates? : Kathika Travel Website

While attacks from pirates might sound more like a children’s story and evoke images of eye patches and parrots, for an increasing number of cruise ship tourists, pirate threat has become a reality in the last few days. The troubled Gulf of Aden between Yemen and Somalia, a part of the Suez Canal route, seems to be hitting the headlines all too often these days and there might be some flow-on effects for cruise travel in general. Some of the recent incidents include:

An attack on the MS Nautica, a cruise ship being operated by American company Oceanic Cruises. This is a 600 foot long ship with 650 passengers (and 400 crew) and passengers were certainly surprised that any pirates would attempt to attack such a boat. The attack involved pirates firing eight rifle shots at the boat, but the passengers had already been told to get inside to safety and nobody was harmed; the cruise ship was then able to speed up and easily out-run the pirate boats. This was the largest ship ever attacked in the area so it does seem that pirates are getting bolder.
Although the tour operator Classic International Cruises Australia hasn’t acknowledged the attack, travelers on the MV Athena say that it as attacked by pirates as it passed the Somali coast earlier this week. About 50 small pirate boats surrounded the cruise ship and according to passengers, the crew ordered that they stay indoors and later the captain announced that two pirate attacks had taken place. Later the crew denied this and say there was no attack, but nobody is disputing that the ship was surrounding by the pirate vessels.

While in the past, it has been mostly commercial vessels like cargo ships and oil tankers that have been the target of pirate attacks, these incidents on cruise ships have started to get tourists worried. Experts are already suggesting that insurance costs will rise; this could cause an increase in the cost of cruise ship vacations or it might mean that cruise companies change their routes to avoid high pirate risk zones. For personal insurance there are also some issues. At the moment, most insurance policies for travelers would cover any injuries they sustained during a pirate attack, for example, but they wouldn’t cover any ransom payment that might be needed to get tourists released from hostage situations when pirates take over a ship. It’s certainly opening up a whole new can of worms for cruise travelers who will have to watch the region closely to see how the situation develops in the coming year.

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