Later this month, Royal Caribbean International (RCI) will start rehiring crew members from India.
Around two weeks after announcing it would temporarily halt hiring crew members from India, this policy will be reversed.
RCI President and CEO, Michael Bayley (pictured) posted on Facebook that the hirings will once again commence, beginning on 21st May.
“We are starting crewing from India on 21st May,” Bayley announced in his post, and said “enhanced protocols” will be used for these crew members.
Crew coming from India will undergo a rigorous set of testing and quarantine procedures to ensure they can safely join a ship. These include:
- PCR Test.
- 14-day quarantine.
- PCR Test.
- Charter flight.
- PCR Test.
- Given a Covid-19 vaccine.
- Quarantine.
- PCR Test.
Bayley said these protocols will be in place at least for a “short time”, although these enhanced protocols will also be used for crew members coming from other countries where new Covid-19 case counts are surging.
Since the additional quarantine requirements will take up more time than the usual embarking process, crew contracts will be extended by two months.
In addition to vaccinating crew members coming from India, RCI has been systematically bringing ships to PortMiami to get crew members vaccinated.
In less than a week, crew members from ‘Explorer’, ‘Liberty’, ‘Navigator’, ‘Freedom’, ‘Independence’ and ‘Mariner of the Seas’, have all received a first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine.
More company ships are due to arrive soon to enable crew members to be vaccinated.
Bayley also lauded the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) approval of the Sinopharm vaccine, which is China’s vaccine option that is more easily available in that country and other nearby states.
A WHO emergency listing is a signal to national regulators that a product is safe and effective. It also allows it to be included in COVAX, a global programme to provide vaccines mainly for poor countries, which has hit supply problems.
WHO had already given emergency approval to COVID-19 vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and recently, Moderna.
