Cruise lines add crime data to websites

By Tom Stieghorst

The biggest North American cruise lines on Thursday began posting quarterly reports about allegations of crime on their ships.

At a congressional hearing last week, Royal Caribbean International CEO Adam Goldstein said that Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., Carnival Corp. and Norwegian Cruise Line had all agreed to post the information.

The numbers will be different than those available currently on the U.S. Coast Guard site, which only count crime investigations that are considered closed by the FBI.

The numbers the cruise lines are voluntarily providing include all allegations of serious crime on their ships anywhere in the world.

Some in Congress have criticized the official statistics required by the Cruise Vessel Safety and Security Act of 2010 as under-representing the amount of crime on ships.

A bill introduced by Sen. Jay Rockefeller would require cruise lines to report all allegations of crime, regardless of whether they are investigated by the FBI or whether the cases have been closed.

Royal Caribbean is reporting its statistics in the Safety & Security tab of the Customer Service page on its website. Norwegian Cruise Line is reporting its crime stats under additional information at the bottom of its Safety & Security tab on its Corporate page.