How Do Cruise Ships Prevent or Protect Themselves From Pirate Attacks?
In: Technology
Mostly by not going where pirates are known to operate.
There are exception of course such as the Italian cruise liner during the 80s that was hijacked by the PLA, that one got famous with them pushing a guy in a wheelchair overboard and was made into movies and such, but it was more a terrorist hijacking than piracy for profit.
Mostly cruise ships don’t go places where they might be in danger for insurance purposes alone.
Cruise ships while potentially holding potentially more and better hostages than a giant cargo ship crewed only by a dozen people from a place where wages are extremely low are a bad idea for piracy for profit.
Yes you get a lot of valuable hostages from rich countries but you also have to deal with a large number of hostages and their rich country militaries.
It doesn’t take many pirates to control a dozen crew on a cargo ship, but hundreds of crew and even more tourist on cruise ship will be harder to control.
Also cruise ships are big and dangerous to be around evene if they aren’t hostile.
In 2020 a small cruise ship with engine trouble drifted close to Venezuelan waters and for some reason a Venezuelan warship tried to board them. Due to bad luck and bad planing on their part, the cruise ship went right through the warship and sank it without meaning to. (It helped that it had a reinforced bow to deal with ice.)
Cruise ships are not a common target for piracy.
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