Scandal-Plagued Carnival Books First Post-Corona Cruise For Aug. 1

When we first saw the following headline, our first reaction was to rub our eyes in disbelief, before double-checking the URL to make sure we were really on CNBC.com and not some new Onion vertical.

With an open criminal investigation in Australia and hundreds of thousands of outraged customers and their friends and family members who will likely never voluntarily board another cruise for as long as they live, Carnival Corp – the world’s biggest cruise line operator – is planning to launch its first post-corona cruises on Aug. 1, with 8 ships leaving from ports in Miami, Cape Canaveral and Galveston, Texas.

JUST IN: Carnival Cruise Line says it will begin to phase-in cruises again starting August 1 with eight of its ships leaving from Miami, Port Canaveral and Galveston. https://t.co/jn8limUSe7

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) May 4, 2020

The first few replies sum up what we imagine to be the sentiments of many Americans who followed the horrifying reports about what we dubbed “a nightmare at sea”: Every time a new outbreak aboard a cruise ship seemed to explode into an international incident, the cruise line was seemingly inevitably a Carnival subsidiary, particularly the “Princess Cruises” line that drew the ire of Australian public health officials and – later – prosecutors.

First there was the Diamond Princess, then the Coral Princess and the Ruby Princess.

Ships from other Carnival subsidiaries also saw outbreaks at sea. Ultimately, dozens died and thousands were infected. Reporting from Bloomberg and the Washington Post has suggested that Carnival management was partly at fault.

Replies to the news were pretty much what we expected…