Carnival Cruise Line to fly home Filipino crew members

ORLANDO, Florida — Carnival Cruise Line will use charter planes to send home Filipino and Indonesian crew members, the company through its Carnival Breeze Hotel director announced March 25.

The crew will be taken by bus from Orlando, Florida to Miami Airport with Carnival representatives looking after them, and there will be a team to help to board these charter flights home. The first charter flights are scheduled for the next week on Monday and Tuesday, according to a report by CrewCenter.com.

The disembarkation of the crew will happen in phases. The first group to disembark the ship will be the crew with contracts already expired, and the crew who need to sign-off in the next three weeks. This means that everybody that needed to sign off from 21 March to 4 April will be in the first group to disembark the ship.

The charter flights will send the Filipino crew to Manila, and Indonesians will fly to Jakarta and Bali. Carnival is encouraging the crew to take this charter flights and go home on a much-needed vacation, the main reason is that the company doesn’t know when they will get more charter flights, due to the ongoing situation with travel restrictions across the world. There are 105 crew members to disembark Carnival Breeze on Monday and Tuesday.

Team members onboard other Carnival cruise ships are also waiting for the same announcement in a hope they will join their families back home as soon as possible.