The new president of Holland America Line says he is “hopeful” that sailings will resume by the Christmas holidays.
Joining a Travel Weekly webcast from Miami, Gus Antorcha said: “I very much hope to be operating the holiday cruises. It’s an important time for families and we want to make sure we offer them the ability to celebrate together; so I’m very hopeful we’ll be back.”
Antorcha said the line may even be able to re-start a portion of its fleet earlier than December 15 – the date to which it has announced its pause in operations, and suggested it may offer some shorter duration cruises initially.
“What exactly is going to be happening, I don’t know; it’s very hard to guess. But I’m hopeful we’ll restart. For us, we cancelled through to December 15, but it may be that we are able to start a portion of the fleet sooner than that,” he said.
“For Holland, the right decision was to cancel out to December 15. For other lines, I think the more contemporary segment which operate potentially shorter itineraries, they didn’t think it was appropriate to go that far. We sail longer, as you know, and so there’s some questions around duration at the beginning when we get started again.”
Antorcha said he “hesitated to share too much detail” on the measures the line is putting in place for its return to service, with the situation “evolving all the time” and different markets expected to require different protocols.
“What we knew about the situation, the virus, the pandemic, 30 days ago is different than we know today. Just yesterday, a new test just got approved from the FDA. It’s cheap, it looks like it’s reliable with a good amount of sensitivity. And so that might change how we think about our testing protocols, for example,” he said.
“It’s also going to require us to be flexible in how work with the authorities in the various markets. We’re a global corporation, obviously. But at Holland America, we’re very much a global brand. We serve a variety of different markets and each of those markets may be at a different point in time in fighting the pandemic. And so the protocols might be different depending on where we’re sailing from.”
Antorcha added: “It’s about how we work with local authorities and what that community feels we need to do to protect them. So that’ll evolve; the science is going to change and we will evolve with it.”
Acknowledging that MSC Cruises has already restarted in Europe, soon to be followed by Costa Cruises, Antorcha said: “What MSC and Costa are going to be doing in their markets will likely be different than what we will be doing in the US; and it may very well be different than what we’re going to be doing in the UK, because we have to be responsive to what the health authorities and what the communities are comfortable with.
“Clearly, if there’s a best practice we’re doing the United States for whatever reason, or there’s a best practice put in place in Italy, we’re going to replicate that regardless of whatever the local requirements are. But as we get closer to that point we’re sailing, there will be excruciating detail, and rightfully so, on what exactly what we will do in each particular market.”
Antorcha said he had not been involved directly in conversations with US health agency the CDC but had been in many conversations with Clia, and said he was hopeful there could be some movement in the US soon.
“I think the situation in the US has been difficult over the last 60 days because many communities, including the one I’m living in now – Miami – experienced a pretty a pretty large spike. But now you see those numbers rapidly decreasing – we’re at a fraction of the cases we were just a few weeks ago. So when you think about November, December, that’s really a long time from now, in the context of things changing all the time,” he said.
“The level of care that we go to, as an industry, to protect our guests and our crew is phenomenal, and I think we will take the same approach as an industry. This won’t be one cruise line trying to outdo the other. That doesn’t serve the industry and I think you will see us over time really hone in on what we need to do to protect our guests and our crew.”