Norwegian cruise line involved in a humanitarian salvage at sea

I did my usual call to one of my clients on his return from his cruise to make sure he had a lovely holiday when he told me he was an eye witness to what had happened on the Norwegian Spirit giving me some interesting insight information. I never expected what he was just about to tell me and it was interesting to find out from someone who actually was on board and could tell me about it from a passengers view.

The Spirit had started its journey in Italy for a 7 nights cruise and on the morning of the 12th May she left the port of  Naples and was heading to Greece, due to arrive in Mykonos early hours of the morning after. As the ship gets close to the Sicilian coast a communication arrived from the Italian Coast Guard to offer assistance to a broken boat drifting out at sea. The small boat had 300 migrants crammed on it who had nothing but the clothes they had on.

On board there was women who needed urgent medical assistance. She was in labour. She was checked by the medical staff on board and then she was flown by helicopter to the nearest hospital in Sicily. Everyone one else on board the board was taken care of the Italian Coast guard who would have rehoused them in refugees centres. The ship stopped for a total of 6 hrs which meant they had to miss the stop at Mikonos the next day. This meant passengers spent an extra day at sea and then proceeding as normal to the next scheduled call in Piraeus.

As you can imagine some of the passengers of the Norwegian Spirit weren’t too happy about spending an extra day at sea and this humanitarian Aid was seen as a disruption to some of the passengers’ plans. There would have been a large number of people with a planned day out or planned excursions and some others maybe just visiting family or friends. I can imagine Norwegian cruise line would have received a large number of complaints and requests of reimbursements but I’m not sure this is a selfish way of thinking or not. What do you think?