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Michael Bayley Updates FCCA Platinum Members on America’s Cruise Tourism Task Force
Michael Bayley, President and CEO of Royal Caribbean International, joined a Zoom gathering for FCCA Platinum Members – which has become a standing biweekly fixture for the group to discuss various issues during the ‘new normal’ – on September 2 to update on an initiative aiming to move cruise tourism’s North American return full steam ahead, America’s Cruise Tourism Task Force. A lightly edited transcript follows.
First of all, I’d like to reinforce the importance of the FCCA, particularly during this very strange and difficult times – and also reinforce the importance of CLIA, CLIA Europe, CLIA Australia, China, Asia, etc.
It’s times like this where coming together really does matter, and I’d also like to thank all the Platinum Members for continuing to be supportive. I think we’ve got a journey ahead of us as an industry, but we’re going to get through it faster and better if we work together.
The Task Force came together of course out of necessity. What we experienced somewhat in Europe through CLIA Europe was a coming together, collaboration and creation of a foundation and mechanism that allowed the industry and various destinations to come together so we could start to collaborate to create what basically became the EU Healthy Gateways document, which basically provided broad guidelines for the resumption of cruising in Europe.
At no point did it dictate the detailed protocols to cruise companies or destinations, but the guidelines became a foundation for meaningful discussion between cruise companies and governments either regionally or nationally within Europe. Subsequently, over the past few weeks, cruising has resumed in a small way within Europe.
In discussion within the cruise industry, we thought it would be great if we could reach out to all of our destination partners across the Caribbean, Mexico, Central, South America and form this America’s Cruise Tourism Task Force, which we did in the beginning of July.
On this Task Force, we have myself co-chairing along with the Hon. Mia Amor Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, and we have several subcommittees: the Caribbean Chair and Subcommittees, which consist of the Dutch Caribbean, the Bahamas, the English Caribbean, the French Caribbean, Spanish Subcommittee, Mexican Subcommittee and Central/South America.
We have in total 45 different countries participating in the Task Force, and from the cruise industry we have representatives and executives from most of the major companies operating in the United States.
It’s a broad group, and the team has been meeting on a regular basis with a mission to create a platform where we can collaborate through a complicated, fast-moving, dynamic environment, and the team’s mission is to create a similar document to EU Healthy Gateways by September 14 – serving as a broad set of guidelines that we can all work on in a more detailed way to ensure that we can
create a platform that allows us to operate with some consistency between destinations and cruise ships so that we can resume cruising sometime in the future and protect our guests along with the communities that we visit.
The other element of this for most of the cruise companies is that the majority are either located in the United States or operating from U.S. ports, and therefore have an ongoing process and dialogue with the CDC and can provide input for the period of comment concluding at the end of September and submission of plans following that – which will hopefully allow for a phased return of cruising.
I would also like to note that I think we all recognize and agree that this is a dynamic and fast-moving situation, and what we’re learning is our understanding of COVID is improving dramatically – and the platform the Task Force has created is not a fixed structure; it needs to stay in place over many months in the future.
What has struck me about the Task Force to date is the remarkable collaboration and cooperation, from fellow competing companies to destinations – there’s just a desire to figure this out and get us all back on the right path.
