Amid Heavy Losses, Carnival Plans To Sell 6 Cruise Ships

With hopes of keeping the company afloat amid plummeting stock prices and heavy losses, Carnival Corporation is planning to sell 6 cruise ships which generally cost between $500 million to $1 billion when in a new condition.

With uncertainty looming over the company, the officials could be heard saying that they cannot make any predictions as to when normal operations would resume.

Industry experts were quick to say that the $45.6 billion Cruise Industry was one of the hard-hit sectors where companies had to pay heavily to disembark passengers who were already on board the ship when the virus was hit.

Carnival_Breeze — Representation Image – Credits: Carnival Corp.

Also, many companies now face multi-million dollar lawsuits from passengers on COVID-19 hit ships. On top of their woes, is the ongoing crew repatriation crisis. At the beginning of the pandemic, some 100,000 seafarers were stuck onboard cruise ships. Carnival had to shell heavily on chartered flights and sending entire cruise ships with crew members onboard to the countries of origin of these crewmembers.

With an approximated 21,000 seafarers still stuck onboard, Carnival plans to repatriate them by June end.

With losses of about $4.4 billion in the last 3 months, Carnival anticipates a tough time ahead. Revenue dropped from $4.8 billion to $700 million for the March-May period compared to 2019.

Company officials are optimistic that business would begin again from late summer. So far, Carnival has registered $475m in bookings for 2020 sailings, securing an aggregate of $2.6 billion in cash.

Reference: theguardian.com