If you’re a frequent cruise traveler, you may have found that one of the biggest hassles of planning a cruise vacation can be the uncertainty. With all the jumbled up laws concerning maritime law and the fact that cruise lines have long been allowed to conceal certain information from the public, booking a cruise can sometimes feel like making a leap of faith.
Luckily, recent years have seen some large-scale campaigns to change this and make cruise line information more available and visible to the public. One of the most recent examples of this is the Cruise Lines International Association’s (CLIA) Cruise Forward program.
What Is Cruise Forward?
Launched in 2012, the CLIA’s Cruise Forward program is designed to educate the public about the practices of the world’s leading cruise lines. According to its website, Cruise Forward is “an information hub that provides timely and relevant data and content about the industry’s systems of accountability, economic and environmental impact and enduring commitment to the safety, health and wellbeing of our guests and crew.”
Cruise Forward recently relaunched its website to offer visitors a better look inside the world of cruising. The website is designed to be as user-friendly as possible, with all kinds of important facts and stats and answers to many FAQs. No longer will passengers have to search around on government databases or scour news websites for headlines pertaining to one particular cruise line. With Cruise Forward, the public is given one coherent place where they can find everything they’ve been looking for right at their fingertips.
The website is divided into three sections: Wellbeing, Impact, and Accountability, and each of these sections are broken down into sub-pages. Beneath Wellbeing, the website includes separate pages for Safety, Security, and Health; beneath Impact, there are separate pages for Environmental and Economic; and beneath Accountability, there are separate pages for Crew, Passenger, and Regulation. Each of these pages contains downloadable resources, PDFs, infographics, and informative articles.
With its user-friendly interface, a vow to stay current, and countless downloadable resources, the new Cruise Forward website is a valuable resource for travelers and shareholders and can help passengers plan safer, more enjoyable vacations.
Where Cruise Forward Falls Short
The website includes statistics such as: “94%: The overall customer satisfaction rate of the cruise industry,” and “Though rarely needed, ships must provide survival craft for 25% more guests than are actually on board.” Despite this, it does not include information such as how many slip and fall cases occur each year on board cruise ships, or how many instances of food poisoning or disease outbreaks have occurred in the past few years.
Certainly, Cruise Forward has every right to highlight the more positive sides of cruise travel. But as anyone who has been injured on a cruise can attest to, cruise ship accidents do happen, and they can be life-changing. Passengers deserve to know this information before they book their vacations, but you will not find these less-than-ideal statistics on the Cruise Forward website.
With any luck, your cruise vacation is a dream come true—no injuries, no worries, and nothing but a great tan and great memories to report back to your friends and family about. Hopefully, websites like CruiseForward.org can help you book that dream vacation.
However, if something goes wrong and you experience an accident, injury, or illness on your cruise that should have been prevented by the crew or cruise line, contact us today to discuss your options.
About the Author:
Andrew Winston is a partner at the personal injury law firm of The Law Office of Andrew Winston. He has been recognized for excellence in the representation of injured clients by admission to the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, is AV Rated by the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory, and was recently voted by his peers as a Florida “SuperLawyer”—an honor reserved for the top 5% of lawyers in the state—and to Florida Trend’s “Legal Elite.”
