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10 Best Cruise Stocks To Buy Now

Ramish Cheema
9 min read

In This Article:

In this piece, we will take a look at the ten best cruise stocks to buy now. For more cruise stocks, head on over to 5 Best Cruise Stocks To Buy Now. 

One of the hardest hit sectors by the coronavirus pandemic was the cruise ship industry. While other hospitality sectors, such as hotels and restaurants had time to prepare to deal with lockdown requirements aimed to curb the spread of the virus, cruise companies were simply caught off guard. This is due to the fact that as lockdowns started to be enforced, many cruise ships were in the middle of their journeys, and were often left stranded at sea due to port and harbor closures. In fact, a little known fact about the pandemic is that one of the most widespread coronavirus outbreaks after China in fact took place on a cruise ship. This ship was the Diamond Princess which has more than a thousand guest cabins and roughly the same number of crews.

The ill fated vessel began its journey in late January and saw its passenger and crew count swell to almost four thousand people. All of these were left stranded at the Tokyo harbor in Japan for almost a month after initial reports surfaced that two elderly passengers that had gotten off the ship in Hong Kong had tested positive for the deadly virus. Matters took a serious turn when ten passengers on board the Diamond Princess tested positive and the ship remained in limbo stuck at Tokyo for 27 days, with 14 passengers dying and 712 becoming infected.

However, the Diamond Princess was not the only ship stuck due to the virus. According to a Guardian investigation, more than one hundred thousand cruise ship crew members were left stranded at sea due to the virus, and many of them would die in the waters as well. In terms of economic costs, research from Russian maritime universities show that they are simply unbelievable. The researchers point out that between the third quarter of 2019 and the end of the first quarter of 2020, cruise companies saw their profits drop from $30 billion to just $50 million, for an almost complete decimation. The pandemic also put several companies out of business, as the total number of cruise companies dropped from 93 to 81 as the virus wreaked havoc all over the world.

The pandemic also shook the perception of the cruise liner industry. A natural language processing (NLP) analysis of the tweets related to the industry conducted by researchers in Spain showed that the majority of sentiment surrounding the industry was negative. The analysis revealed that widespread media coverage of the pandemic combined with previously held beliefs about the cruise industry as being a 'petri dish' for diseases contributed significantly to negative sentiment, and it cautioned that this sentiment can continue even as the pandemic settles and life goes back to normal. Since this raises the question of whether people would be willing to take a cruise after the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic, brief research reveals that researchers from the U.K. and Australia try to answer these very questions. By using a questionnaire through a research panel, they determined that risk perceptions related to cruise traveling were based on the participants' home country, with respondents from Australia having a more negative outlook when compared to those from the U.K. It also found out that the coronavirus pandemic was unique in the sense that it led to an experience agnostic perception about the future intention to take a cruise, which was in opposition to previous viruses that had seen people with previous cruise ship experiences having more positive intentions.

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