More than 60% of Key West voters sent a message to the cruise industry on election day: keep your big ships away from our city.
The three measures limit the size and type of cruise ships that can dock and the number of passengers who can disembark. The new rules face legal challenges. In the meantime, hard-hit cruise companies are planning to visit Key West as soon as COVID-19 restrictions allow — and hoping to work out compromises.
“We are still assessing,” said Bari Golin-Blaugrund, spokesperson for industry lobbying group Cruise Lines International Association, in an email. “For now what I can tell you is the cruise industry places incredible importance on being a strong partner in the communities where we visit, and we believe open dialogue and communication is a critical part of that. We hope to have that opportunity in Key West.”
This month the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention replaced its no-sail order, in effect since mid-March, with a long list of requirements cruise companies need to meet in order to restart passenger operations, including weekly COVID-19 testing of all crew, practice voyages and extra monitoring. CLIA member lines have canceled U.S. cruises until January 2021.
Voters rarely have a direct say in how their cities do business with cruise companies; dockage fees and schedules are negotiated directly between the companies and the port authorities. But after cruise ships became COVID-19 hot spots in the spring, a group of Keys residents launched a campaign to reduce cruise traffic to the city in three ways by limiting the number of daily cruise ship visitors to 1,500 (passed with 63% of the vote), banning cruise ships with 1,300 passengers and crew or more (passed with 61% of the vote), and giving docking priority to cruise ships that have the best health and environmental records (passed with 81% of the vote).
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Over the last few months, as the campaign heated up with battling advertisements sometimes featuring misleading claims, Royal Caribbean Group sought to resolve any tension about the industry directly with the city.
City Manager Greg Veliz said that the company engaged with city officials over the past several months, seeking a compromise.
“We told them, there’s a referendum item and it will be taken to the voters and at one point will be out of our hands,” Veliz told the Herald. “I have no authority to deal.”
Spokesperson for Royal Caribbean Group Jonathon Fishman said in an email that the discussions centered around “how we can collaborate and work with the city to resolve any issues.”
Carnival Corporation referred the Herald to CLIA, and Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings did not respond to a request for comment.
The industry has worked with other cities seeking to decrease cruise visitors. After Dubrovnik, Croatia, capped the number of cruise passengers who could visit the city at 5,000 per day in 2019, CLIA and the city’s mayor reached a memorandum of understanding to coordinate ship schedules to comply with the new rules.
But the Keys referendums do more than cap total visitors. They specify the kind of ships that can visit Key West — those with “the best environmental and safety records” and those with total capacity under 1,300 people.
Determining which ships have the best environmental records will be difficult as environmental violations are not tracked publicly. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks norovirus and COVID-19 outbreaks on ships. And depending on the determination standards, those with the “best” records could change rapidly, creating logistical difficulties for cruise lines.
On the issue of size, only 10 of the 50 ships that called in Key West in fiscal year 2019 would have met the city’s new criteria, according to an analysis of port data. Those ships belong to luxury cruise lines Regent Seven Seas (owned by Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings), Silversea and Azamara (owned by Royal Caribbean Group), and Seabourn (owned by Carnival Corporation). Only three of the eight ships scheduled to be delivered this year from the four largest cruise companies would meet the new requirements.
Smaller ships typically leave the Caribbean in the summer to cruise in Europe and Alaska, meaning there may not be any ships visiting Key West in the summer, said Teijo Niemela, editor of Cruise Business Magazine.
“For the supplier side, if I were a tour operator in Key West, I would be really worried about that,” he said. “The season may be too short to be profitable.”
For larger ships, its unclear what impact removing Key West might have on business. Companies may need to rely more on their private islands in the Bahamas when reworking itineraries, said Niemela. The Southernmost City added a different dimension to itineraries heavy on Caribbean and Bahamian island and provided variety especially important to short cruises.
For the newest cruise company to the scene, Virgin Voyages, the referendums are the latest in a series of blows since it began construction of its first ship, Scarlet Lady in 2017. In 2019, the Trump administration banned cruises to Cuba, a destination that had been a major selling point of the company’s itineraries from Miami, the ship’s planned home port.
Now, with the ship’s launch pushed back from March to at least January 2021 due to COVID-19, the company has lost another destination in Key West. Scarlet Lady can hold around 3,900 passengers and crew, more than three times the new limit.
Spokesperson Michelle Estevam said the company cares deeply about supporting local businesses and preserving the environment, evidenced by its investment to purchase offsets to neutralize carbon emissions from its ship.
“In light of the recent decision that was made by the Key West community, we are reviewing the potentially impacted sailings and working diligently to map out next steps,” she said in an email. “We are committed to an ongoing dialog and continuing to invest in measures designed to minimize our environmental impact.”
The city will be defending the referendums in court from challenges filed by the private owner of one of the cruise piers, Pier B.
Reporter Gwen Filosa contributed to this report.