It was reported that Port Galveston was already looking forward to the return of cruises a few months ago. Finally, Royal Caribbean is going to make its return by August. Royal Caribbean will conduct a 5-day simulate voyage from Port Galveston on August 1.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has laid out the requirements for cruises to sail again. According to the CDC guidelines, cruise ships will need a 95 percent vaccination threshold on both crew and passengers. If not, the cruises will have to conduct a simulated voyage to test their COVID19 protocols.
Aside from completing a simulated voyage with non-paying customers, the cruise line will also have to complete an after-action report. This will include deficiencies in its COVID mitigation plans. Plus, they need to provide solutions on how to resolve these deficiencies for the revenue cruises.
Royal Caribbean’s Family-Friendly Cruise from Port of Galveston
Royal Caribbean opted to conduct simulated voyages to offer their services to families. In early July, the goal of the company’s simulated voyage is to get more younger individuals who can’t get vaccinated yet onboard.
Mark Tamis who is Royal Caribbean’s senior vice president of hotel operations said that “When the first set of potential regulations were published, it was such an obvious choice of the path that we had to go down”.
He added that there were “two paths”. One is to meet the 95% vaccination threshold while the other is to have it under 95%. Tamis said that “It wasn’t even really a consideration. We knew one path would allow us to have families and one path would limit the number of families”.
Royal Caribbean announced on Tuesday that they are going to select volunteers for their simulated voyage. More than 350,000 people already signed up for the test voyage according to the company.
If all things go as planned, Royal Caribbean will have their first revenue cruise from the Port Galveston by August 15.
Earlier this month, Carnival Cruise began operating in Port Galveston. Carnival Cruise used their employees for their practice cruises. However, Carnival announced that they will require vaccination to meet the vaccination threshold. As for Royal Caribbean, they are going to require vaccination for passengers 12 and up.
