‘The system is rigged’: Cruise lines have little to fear legally from COVID deaths
The cruise line industry faces a wave of lawsuits from passengers and their families saying they or their loved ones contracted COVID-19 on a ship, resulting in either death or severe illness.
Yet maritime and corporate law make it difficult to extract significant damages from cruise lines. Even after a series of coronavirus outbreaks at sea and a growing number of lawsuits, the industry’s biggest players face little serious threat, legal experts say.
Multibillion-dollar cruise companies are not worried about the potential financial effect of such lawsuits, even if they end up losing many of the cases, said Ross A. Klein, a sociology professor and cruise industry expert at St. John’s College at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
“It’s part of the price of doing business,” he said. “From their perspective, it isn’t serious.”
Activists and lawmakers have long alleged that cruise ship operators downplay onboard crimes and that investigations of them are muddied by questions of jurisdictions on international waters. The pandemic is now demonstrating how other legal constraints, and jurisdictional issues that seem to favor the cruise industry, are further complicating civil disputes over COVID-19 cases on cruise ships.
“The system is rigged in favor of the billion-dollar corporations that own these cruise ships,” said Mark Chalos, a managing partner for the San Francisco law firm representing the family of Lucio Gonzalez, 73, who died from COVID and had been on a Princess Cruise in 2020. The line’s parent company, Carnival Corp., said it had no comment on pending litigation.
Cases involving a death on a ship are governed by the Death on the High Seas Act, a 1920 law that limits damages collected by the family of a passenger who died because of negligence to financial losses only — not for pain and suffering, according to legal experts.
For an elderly cruise passenger, family members can typically expect to collect funeral and burial costs and any financial support the deceased would have contributed, legal experts say.
Judges have been tough on plaintiffs who have sued over COVID-19 infections on cruise ships, requiring the plaintiffs to detail specifically how and when they were exposed to the virus and how the cruise line was negligent in exposing them, said James Walker, a Miami attorney who has filed several cruise line lawsuits. As a result, he said, judges have dismissed many lawsuits, while others have been settled for less than $10,000 each.
Although cruise ships had a history of outbreaks even before the pandemic, many judges have also agreed that cruise lines targeted with a COVID-19 lawsuit shouldn’t be held to a stricter standard than any other place of business on land, such as a hotel, restaurant or supermarket, according to attorneys who have filed such suits.
Among the challenges facing plaintiffs battling cruise lines is what is called the ticket contract, the multi-page document that governs the relationship between a cruise passenger and the cruise company. Passengers receive the document after booking passage on a cruise.
The contract varies slightly among cruise companies but almost always prohibits passengers from filing or being part of a class-action lawsuit against a cruise line and sets specific deadlines for filing a lawsuit. The contracts also require that cases not involving personal injury, illness or death be resolved through binding arbitration.
“Ordinary families can’t band together collectively to fight with better resources,” Chalos said. “Class actions level the playing field.”
The contracts also require that lawsuits against cruise companies be filed in designated federal courthouses. Carnival Cruises requires all lawsuits against the line to be filed in the Southern District Court of Florida, in Miami. Princess Cruises requires filing in the Central District Court of California, in Los Angeles. Holland America requires lawsuits against the company to be filed in the Western District Court of Washington, in Seattle.
Legal experts say these requirements put passengers who live a long distance from the courthouse where they must file at a disadvantage. Such bureaucratic hurdles also discourage cruise passengers from taking on a cruise company.
“This means that if you live in Omaha, Nebraska, you can’t sue them in Omaha,” Klein said.
The number of lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against Princess and its parent company, Carnival Corp., grew in 2020 to 96, up from 37 in 2019, court records show. The number of lawsuits filed against Carnival in Miami also increased, though only slightly, to 315 in 2020 from 306 in 2019, according to court records.
Princess Cruises made headlines in the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 spread around the world, because of several onboard outbreaks. The Diamond Princess was quarantined Feb. 4, 2020, in Yokohama, Japan, with more than 700 infected passengers. A passenger on the Grand Princess died of COVID-19 after returning to San Francisco from a cruise to Mexico.
The key to winning a coronavirus lawsuit against a cruise line is proving the cruise ship failed to act reasonably under the circumstances, said Michael Karcher, a Miami attorney who specializes in maritime law.
But he said cruise lines are defending lawsuits filed early in the pandemic by arguing that nobody knew at the time the best health protocols to adopt. More recently, the largest cruise companies have added language to their ticket contracts notifying passengers that by booking a cruise they accept the risk of contracting the coronavirus on a ship — a common disclaimer at businesses nowadays.
Since the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shut down cruising March 14, 2020, and extended it for more than a year, the largest cruise lines departing from the U.S. have adopted stringent health protocols, including requirements that passengers be vaccinated or tested for COVID-19 and wear masks under certain onboard conditions.
