Covid leaves cruise dreams rusting at the ship-breakers

Villainised for spreading the first wave, nowhere are the ravages of COVID-19 more stark than the cruise ship graveyards off Turkey.

Luxury cruise ships are seen being broken down for scrap metal at the Aliaga ship recycling port in October in Izmir, Turkey. Picture: Getty

Kamil Onal stood on the edge of a car park overlooking the Aliaga shipyards on Turkey’s Aegean coast and gestured expansively at the destruction below. Crammed together on the docks lay the ruined remains of five cruise ships, each at least 10 storeys high and more than 850ft long.

Last year, these ships would have been carrying thousands of passengers around the world, entertaining them with glitter-strewn dance shows and pumping them full of cocktails at a variety of idyllic locations. Now, after the ravaging of the cruise business by the coronavirus pandemic, they are being “retired”, as it is euphemistically referred to in the industry: stripped and sold for parts.

“We’re giving all the pianos away as presents,” said Onal, the chairman of a ship-recycling industrialists’ association in the shipyard, about 30 miles north of Izmir. “These ships are just enormous. I walked inside one of them. It was huge.”

Now, after the ravaging of the cruise business by the coronavirus pandemic, the ships are being “retired”. Pictures: Getty

From a few hundred yards away, it was just possible to make out the workers scuttling over the massive hulks like ants on a jam jar — tearing out plasterboard, gilded cornicing, beds and bathtubs, dismantling the light fittings down to wire and bulb.

The five ships in the dock had until recently belonged to two of the world’s biggest cruise lines — one of them, Carnival, is partly British-owned — navigating the warm blue waters of the Bahamas or Mexico’s Pacific coast. Soon, Onal said, two more UK cruise ships will join them.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “In the last 10 years we only recycled four or five ships in total, and they were smaller than these ones. Now this year there are at least seven.”

Dismantling ships of this size is an enormous task. Despite hiring 1,000 extra workers to help to break down the cruise liners – all containing thousands of tons of scrap metal – Onal said that it could take up to a year for each to be stripped fully. For now, the skeletons of what were once cabins, tennis courts and ballrooms lie open to the elements. Here and there, a bed frame can be seen among the debris.

Around the shipyard, scrap merchants and antiques brokers sift through the remains of the ships. In one corrugated lean-to, hundreds of orange life jackets lie stacked, ready for resale. Nearby, a glamorous woman with black skinny jeans and severe eyeliner presides over a collection of polished bronze light fittings. The scrap is in high demand by dealers.

It is a far cry from the heyday of these ships. One of them, which first set sail in 1988 as Sovereign of the Seas after being named by the former US first lady Rosalynn Carter with a 3ft bottle of champagne, was known as the original “mega” cruise ship – with capacity for more than 2,700 passengers. It came equipped with two pools, glass lifts and a casino.

As the pandemic spread in March, cruise lines in the UK – and others across the world – voluntarily ceased operations.

Another, the Carnival Inspiration, had a rock’n’roll dance club, a library and a card room.

All have given decades of enjoyment to British families looking for a relaxing holiday on the high seas. June Bowen-Jones, 57, a former teacher from Wales, went on a seven-day cruise with her family on the Carnival Inspiration out of Florida 17 years ago – sailing from Tampa through Belize, Costa Maya and Grand Cayman.

“When you go on these ships, particularly when you first walk on board, it is stunning to see this huge gallery of floors ascending and lifts going up, and the glitz and the glam of it all,” she said. “Just walking on board for me is the most exciting part. That’ll be my lasting memory. Some might say they’re a bit gaudy, and a bit gold, but I just think they’re stunning and a feat of engineering.”

After that first holiday, the family have been taking cruises every year, until the pandemic forced them to postpone a sailing from Venice until 2021, when Bowen-Jones hopes it will be safe enough to return.

“If we can get a vaccine, fantastic. If not, I just don’t know what will happen to the industry in general,” Bowen-Jones said. “I think everyone will be much more vigilant. My experience in the past has always been that these ships are very clean, there has been hand sanitiser and things like that. Now we’re much more aware.”

As the pandemic spread in March, cruise lines in the UK – and others across the world – voluntarily ceased operations. The impact was devastating. Almost 1.2 million people around the world rely on cruise tourism for their livelihoods, according to the Cruise Lines International Association (Clia), tens of thousands of them in the UK.

“It has been an incredibly challenging time not just for the cruise lines but also for the supply chain involved,” said Julie Green of Clia.

A handful of European lines have restarted cruises with heightened safety regulations and obligatory testing for all passengers and crew.

Every year, she claimed, the cruise sector generated pounds 10bn for the UK economy and supported more than 88,000 jobs – from travel agencies to catering companies. Since the shutdown, she estimated there had been a pounds 6.8bn impact to the UK economy.

For now, the UK government advice is to avoid all cruises – a ruling the industry is desperate to change. A handful of European lines have restarted cruises with heightened safety regulations and obligatory testing for all passengers and crew.

With the enhanced procedures, operators will be hoping to avoid a repeat of the chaos on board the British-registered Diamond Princess cruise ship in February and March, when more than a fifth of the crew and passengers were infected with COVID-19. More than 3,600 people were asked to quarantine for 14 days on board the ship off Yokohama, near Tokyo, after a cruise with stops in Taiwan, Vietnam and Hong Kong. At the time, it was the biggest COVID-19 outbreak outside China.

“There is absolutely a way of restarting cruises safely,” Green said. “While the industry has been suspended there has been a lot of work in terms of inventing advanced protocol. We already had a very stringent protocol, but it is being developed even further.”

The ships in Aliaga docks, she said, were old liners that had been retired earlier than planned. But even as they were stripped, there would be other, younger ships returning to the seas.

Additional reporting: Burhan Yuksekkas and Madeleine Spence

The Sunday Times