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When You're Too Sick to Sail: How 2 Enlightened Cruise Lines Deal With This Challenge

Each winter seems to bring an increasing number of reports of outbreaks of Norovirus aboard cruise ships. The Centers for Disease Control reports that during the peak flu season, it averages five reports a week from ships where an outbreak has affected 3 percent or more of the passengers or the crew.

Cruise lines point out correctly that the Norovirus problem is by no means limited to ships, and that ourbreaks are also not uncommon in nursing homes, hotels and other places where people share living accommodations and dining areas.

Cruise lines also contend defensively that in most cases, the Norovirus is brought aboard by an already infected passenger -- and then quickly spread everytime an infected person handles something that then is touched by others.

One way to address the problem, obviously, would be to persuade infected passengers not to set sail in the first place, and to persuade passengers who come down with flu-like symptions in midvoyage to stay in their cabin for 48 hours and not infect fellow passengers.

The problem, of course, is money.

If you've paid a couple thousand dollars for a cruise (and have not taken insurance), you obviously do not want to miss the cruise and forfeit your money. And if you get sick on board, you may be reluctant to pay for a pricey visit to the ship's infirmary, and you don't want to be cheated out of a couple of day's shipboard fun that you paid for.

But we have discovered in the past year -- when our family has been hit twice by Norovirus -- that Holland America and Celebrity have taken note of these concerns, and have adopted policies that provide money-conscious cruisers a financial incentive to do the right thing.

On Celebrity, passengers who believe they may have the flu are encouraged to seek a no-cost onboard medical consultation.

If the ship's doctor concludes that a passenger may indeed have Norovirus (there's no way to know for sure until tests come back following the cruise), Celebrity asks both passenger and roommate to stay in their stateroom for a couple of days. To encourage compliance, Celebrity gives both a fairly generous credit to apply to a future cruise.

Holland America, moreover, makes it relatively painless for a sick passenger to fess up before boarding.

When we told a supervisor upon entry to the embarkation lounge at Port Everglades that we were having a problem with vomiting and diarrhea, she promptly summoned a nurse who pronounced it a probable case of Norovirus -- told us we would be denied boarding.

But the distress of that news was accompanied by the good news that Holland America would either arrange for us to join the cruise at an island stop (at their expense), or let us use our tickets on a future sailing.

While cruise lines hate talking about outbreaks of Norovirus aboard their ships, and may well not be too eager for passengers to know there is at least this one illness that will not lead to a loss of your fare if you are too sick to sail, boarder awareness of these enlightened policies might well lead to more responsible behavior by cruisers.

--The Savvy Cruiser