Hello, this is Simon Corder, welcoming you to the Independence Daily podcast.

And yes, there is some bubbling going along in the background.

That's because I am beside a whirlpool.

No, not a real natural one, but the whirlpool jacuzzi in the middle of the top deck of a new cruise ship

celebrity beyond she's a very large ship that a cynical person would say was largely indistinguishable

from a big apartment block. But as from Wednesday,

she will be sailing first of all to France, to Portugal, to Spain, and then taking people

around the Mediterranean, shuttling mostly between Barcelona and Rome and also doing some tours around the Greek islands.

So I wanted to talk to you today about cruising in general and this cruise ship in particular.

Cruising I think has had absolutely the worst time of any part of the travel industry.

If you remember, Diamond Princess, the cruise ship was for a time held off the port of

Yokohama, Tokyo in Japan, and the passengers were kept on board, and she developed into being one of the original

coronavirus hotspots. It was a terrible time for all involved and people coming back from there

were kind of put onto special buses taken to the airport and put on planes and then met at the other end and it was all

really a very stressful experience. We've seen other cruise ships where a number of people

very sadly lost their lives in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic and some ships where

for weeks they were sailing around trying to find any port

that would take them in. So a really tough time for the cruise industry and the many people

who work in it. And we are talking about 30 million people who take a cruise or took a cruise

in 2019 at least, over 250 ships and many, many thousands

of seafarers who would be working there. So it's a heck of an industry and unfortunately

it is an industry that is singly incompatible with the era of COVID. And that's because,

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