The cruise ship Norwegian Joy is slowly getting ready to return non-essential crew back home after NCLH announced further cancelations of cruises through April 30, 2021.

With the release of the vaccine for COVID for essential workers such as medical professionals and positive thus far response from people who have taken both doses of the vaccine, the cruise industry is starting to review options related to how they can implement policies related to vaccination in order to be able to return the crew to work and the guests to enjoy cruises. However, the views of each cruise line appear to be different, at least for now.

Norwegian Cruise Line will return all crew members that joined recently and isn't part of the skeleton crew back home. The difficult decision was announced in a meeting yesterday and the crew on board received a letter with all the details regarding the latest repatriation process. 

The global cruise company Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. which operates the Norwegian Cruise Line, Oceania Cruises and Regent Seven Seas Cruises, announced today an extension of its previous suspension of global cruises. Suspension of global voyages on all three brands now includes all sailings with embarkation dates through April 30, 2021

The leading fintech company providing payment services for seafarers on the world's major cruise lines announced a new 3D face recognition feature called “FaceCheck”. Adding extra security to the crew members accounts Brightwell says the new feature will bring an additional layer of assurance and fraud prevention to the accounts.

Several people have informed Crew Center that the cruise ship Norwegian Escape struck a pier in the port of Civitavecchia. According to our source, the allision happened on December 17, when the Norwegian Escape was maneuvering toward a dock when it made contact with the pier. The reasons for the accident and how the vessel deviated from its course are still unknown. Fortunately, there are no injured crew members and the damage to the ship’s hull was relatively minor. 

MANILA (Jan 4, 2021) - In a press release the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) capped its repatriation efforts in 2020 by bringing home 327,511 overseas Filipinos workers, coming from at least 90 countries around the world. The DFA said that 29.3 percent of the overseas Filipinos workers, or 95,974 in total, are seafarers from more than 150 cruise ships, oil tankers, and other bulk vessels.

After announcing the latest round of cruise cancelations, now extending through February 2021, Norwegian Cruise Line is considering the possibility of starting cruise operations in Europe before sailing from US ports.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings has announced today an extension of its previous suspension of global voyages through December 31st, 2020.

Knut Kloster, one of the cruise industry's leading visionaries and entrepreneurs, has died at the of 91. He was the founder of Norwegian Caribbean Lines (today Norwegian Cruise Line) and a short-lived business partner with Ted Arison, founder of Carnival Cruise Line. Kloster was the visionary to convert the SS France to a 2,000-passenger cruise ship SS Norway. The SS Norway was the industry’s first mega-ship to sail during the 80s out of Miami.