I think anybody who has ever been on a cruise ship before, can testify as to it being a very relaxed way to holiday. You don’t have to pack and unpack your bags as you go to one destination after another, and it is beautifully soothing to travel the seas, while waking to different sceneries every day. It does of course terrify one when one sees how quickly disaster can occur as in the Italian case.

The safety drills that I have attended on cruise ships really feel very tiresome and some of them have been done less seriously than others, but there was always some effort. I think passengers will take them more seriously in future and perhaps less begrudgingly. One automatically assumes that the routes you are going on generally involve calm waters and safe routes and that you are on the latest and greatest ship which simply cannot sink, but the latest incident involving the cruise ship Costa Concordia, reminds one of the reality. They are still just ships on the ocean and although they may be a lot safer than those of the last few hundred years, they are dangerous, particularly if your captain is busy wining and dining passengers, instead of checking what is going on with the ship.

I was lucky enough to have an escorted view of the inside of the control of one of the major cruise liners, and it was very high tech, with a number of staff checking out all sorts of different things and one wonders what sort of neglect must have occurred in the case of the Costa Concordia. Either way, I am sure passengers on cruise ships at the moment will probably wake up with more gentle rolls of the ship! Captain Francisco Schettino is obviously never going to work in the industry again, but it still appears to be a case of shocking neglect – or perhaps the complacencies that everybody has about these huge ships and safety.