Normally, this is the time of year when cruise passengers are staring at hurricane spaghetti models, wondering whether Cozumel is about to disappear from the itinerary and be replaced by yet another day at sea.
Except this year, the Caribbean has mostly refused to cooperate with the usual late-September drama.
Atlantic hurricane season officially runs through November 30th, but so far cruisers have been spared the tropical-weather itinerary chaos we usually see by now. Instead, the storm causing problems this week is coming from the completely wrong direction.
A developing nor’easter along the East Coast has Royal Caribbean and Carnival changing schedules, delaying turnaround days and, in one case, taking an entire Canada and New England cruise and sending it south to Florida and the Bahamas instead.
Vision of the Seas Trades Canada for the Bahamas
Royal Caribbean’s Vision of the Seas was supposed to leave Baltimore today, September 24th, for a nine-night Canada and New England cruise with calls in Boston, Portland, Saint John and Halifax.
None of those ports are happening.
Instead, Vision will head south with stops at ports that nobody would willingly ever want to visit: Port Canaveral, Nassau, and Freeport.
Weather-related itinerary changes are nothing new, but this one is pretty wild. This isn’t swapping one port for another or moving a sea day around. It’s taking the entire reason many passengers booked the cruise and replacing it with an itinerary that includes the lowest rated ports in the entire Caribbean.
The storm is also delaying Vision’s return from its previous Bermuda cruise. Royal Caribbean expects the ship back in Baltimore at approximately 2 p.m., which pushes boarding for the September 24th sailing to around 4:30 p.m. Everyone must be aboard by 7 p.m.
Passengers finishing the previous cruise who need to change flights can submit qualifying expenses of up to $200 for domestic travel or $400 for international travel. So far, Royal Caribbean has not announced additional compensation for passengers whose Canada cruise has suddenly become one you couldn’t pay me to go on.
Carnival Venezia Isn’t Escaping Either
Up in New York, Carnival Venezia is dealing with the same weather system.
During its September 20th sailing, Carnival shortened the ship’s Bermuda visit, requiring passengers back aboard by 2:30 p.m. instead of the originally scheduled 5 p.m. departure. The ship then adjusted its route back toward New York because of deteriorating conditions, which delayed its return.
That delay rolled right into today’s, September 24th, sailing.
Passengers boarding the next five-night Bermuda cruise were told to arrive later than originally planned, and the itinerary has also been trimmed. The planned overnight stay in Bermuda is gone, with Venezia now scheduled to visit King’s Wharf only from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on September 27th.
So one group of passengers lost part of a Bermuda day, while the next group lost the overnight stay.
Mother Nature apparently decided one disrupted cruise wasn’t enough.
So Much for Watching the Tropics
The funny part is that September is usually when cruise news becomes a steady stream of tropical storm updates and every cruiser suddenly becomes an amateur meteorologist.
This year, the Caribbean has been unusually quiet from a cruise-disruption standpoint, while a nor’easter hundreds of miles to the north is creating exactly the kind of mess we normally associate with hurricane season.
There is still time left before the Atlantic hurricane season officially ends on November 30th, so nobody should start declaring victory just yet.
But for now, cruisers sailing from Baltimore and New York are learning a useful lesson: you don’t need a hurricane to wreck an itinerary.
Sometimes all it takes is a storm coming from the wrong direction and a cruise line saying, “About that Canada trip…”
