Ports closed to cruise ships in the context of COVID-19: What choices are there for coastal states?

Compulsory insurance for cruise vessels as a preparation for the next pandemic: Law of the sea perspective

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many port states faced difficulty when cruise vessels with COVID-19 patients tried to dock at their ports. Although they are basically not obliged to accept such vessels under international law, they cannot easily deny access because the refusal would be viewed as a lack of humanitarian consideration. On the other hand, accepting such vessels leads to the risk of exposing their own nationals to COVID-19 and incurring the financial cost of medical treatment for cruise passengers. In fact, in the cases of Diamond Princess, Costa Atlantica, and Zaandam and Rotterdam, the question of who should take on the financial burden for medical costs of crews and passengers on board these vessels was debated. The current international legal framework does not provide any answer to this question, and therefore, a new framework is needed. If the new framework allocates the economic burden to ensure the provision of tests and medical care so that an intolerably heavy burden is not imposed on port states, they will be more welcoming to cruise vessels with infected people. Such allocation could be realized by requesting that carriers provide a compulsory insurance system for medical care in a pandemic.

COVID-19 and risk spillovers of China's major financial markets: Evidence from time-varying variance decomposition and wavelet coherence analysis

COVID-19 has influenced financial markets drastically; however, this influence has received little attention, particularly in China. This study investigates risk spillovers across China's financial and shipping markets through dynamic spillover measures based on time-varying parameter vector autoregression and generalized forecast error variance decompositions. Stock, fund, and futures markets are identified as major risk senders, whereas other markets are identified as major risk receivers. Surprisingly, bonds, gold, and shipping are safe havens that facilitate portfolio optimization. Furthermore, using wavelet coherence analysis, we find that the coherence between dynamic total spillover and COVID-19 varies across time and frequency domains.

COVID-19: how can travel medicine benefit from tourism's focus on people during a pandemic?

In 2020, COVID-19 affected every aspect of life around the globe. The spread of SARS-CoV-2 through travel led to lockdowns, travel bans and border closures, crippling the tourism industry. Without tourists, there would be no tourism industry-and no travel medicine. Therefore, scholars started to research the human aspect of tourism immediately to develop strategies for economic recovery. The resulting insights are useful for travel medicine not only to see how tourism dealt with a medical crisis but also to understand travellers better who may be seeking health advice during and after a pandemic.This article presents tourism research of 2020 covering risk perception and travel intentions including mass-gatherings, the use of technology to protect from infection, impacts on tourism workers, residents' reactions to potentially infected travellers, discrimination, and racism. A potential fork in the road to tourism's future may have implications for travel health practitioners. Research recommendations conclude the paper. Understanding the industry response during the early days of panic and uncertainty may help prepare not only appropriate guidelines for travellers but also clearer instructions for tourism, transportation, and hospitality in anticipation of the next pandemic.

Resilience Strategies of Ports against Covid-19 in Terms of Chaos Theory

During the Covid-19 pandemic, all sectors experienced chaotic dynamics worldwide. For example, maritime transport, particularly ports as one of its main elements, had to continue operating in this chaotic environment. Ports developed their own strategies to provide resilience against these challenges. However, any study in the related literature has not been reached that reveals resilience strategies of ports by combining literature review and interviews with port practitioners. As a novelty of the study, it was tried to evaluate resilience strategies of ports by grounding chaos theory. Therefore, this study had two aims: (1) identifying the Covid-19 strategies of Turkish container ports; (2) prioritizing these strategies in terms of impact level. First, interviews were conducted with Turkish container port representatives to find out their resilience strategies. These strategies were then validated with a literature review and new ones were detected. Second, separate relation analyses of the strategies were conducted for the interviews and literature. Finally, ports' resilience strategies against Covid-19 disruptions were prioritized using Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) based on the port managers' evaluations. Fuzzy AHP is widely used and accepted in the maritime business literature. This method also diminishes inconsistencies and subjective evaluations by employing fuzzy logic. The results showed that 'Control Mechanism', 'Hygienic Measures', and 'Information Exchange' were the most effective resilience strategies. By using chaos theory, this study helped to theoretically clarify the role of port management approaches to the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. These findings can therefore guide container port practitioners in overcoming pandemic conditions.

Re-Starting the Cruise Sector during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Greece: Assessing Effectiveness of Port Contingency Planning

Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreaks on board cruise ships early in the pandemic highlighted gaps worldwide in public health emergency contingency plans (PHECPs) for responding to unknown threats. To restart cruise operations in 2021 and respond to potential COVID-19 outbreaks, a major tourist-based Greek island port (Port A) developed a COVID-19 PHECP. We assessed plan effectiveness by reviewing epidemiological data and monitoring outcomes, followed by an intra-action review (IAR) analyzing three event responses. From May to December 2021, 118 calls from 23 cruise ships with 119,930 passengers were recorded, with 29 COVID-19 cases in 11 cruises on board 7 ships. No outbreak was recorded during the study period. Strengths of the introduced PHECP included commitment of senior management; a core multi-disciplinary team of local authorities/ship agents involved in design and execution; interoperability agreements for port and ships' PHECPs; cruise industry commitment to compliance; and pre-existing scenarios considering capacity needs. Central government coordination for preparedness planning at local ports is essential for successful responses. Monitoring local and country level response capacities is critical to inform planning, risk assessment, and decision-making. Immediately recording ports' response actions provides the basis to capture lessons and improve contingency plans. To facilitate communication and common response protocols between European and non-European ports, IARs should be conducted between countries.

Legal assessment of BIMCO's infectious or contagious diseases (IOCD) clauses for voyage and time charter parties

The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the shipping industry is still severe, ranging from vessels being denied entrance to ports to crews on board ships being trapped for many months. To counter and regulate those emerging issues, the shipping industry presently incorporated into the charter parties the BIMCO's Disease Clause originated from the 2015 Ebola outbreak, the so-called BIMCO's Infectious or Contagious Diseases (IOCD) Clauses. While proved successful during the Ebola outbreak, those Clauses were inadequate to regulate a global pandemic such as Covid-19 effectively. Specifically, the IOCD Clauses, while they successfully establish the concepts of 'Disease' and 'Affected Area', fail with the allocation of liability, especially when the crew on board is affected by Covid-19 and the ship needs to deviate from course to change the crew. In that instance, the shipowner, provided that he exercised due diligence in proactively avoiding the infection of his crew, is excluded from liability. In contrast, it is deemed that the liability between shipowner and charterer should be at least shared. For voyage charter parties BIMCO's Infectious or Contagious Diseases Clause 2015, applied both to the Ebola and the Covid-19 outbreak, allocates the right of termination and the liability for deviations and excessive costs strictly to charterers. In contrast, for the time charter parties, BIMCO has imposed the 'BIMCO Infectious or Contagious Diseases Clause for Time Charter Parties 2022' amended presently. According to those regulations, the liability can and should be shared between charterers and ship owners. As a result, the shipowner is forced to exercise due diligence more effectively, especially when he is initially liable for the excessive costs.

Cruise tourism in the context of COVID-19: Dilemmas and solutions

COVID-19 cases on international cruise ships have attracted extensive attention from the international community as well as the world's tourism and shipping industry. This virus highlighted the plight that must be faced by cruise ships in complicated times and situations such as pandemics. The comparative method is adopted to analyze the management measures taken by the "Diamond Princess", "Costa Serena", "Westerdam" and "Grand Princess" cruises in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and then to summarize the common dilemmas faced by these cruise ships, including defects of their internal environment, unclear health-care obligations during an epidemic, weak collaboration between the parties involved and their limited performance, and widespread infodemic and unfavorable public opinion. Given these dilemmas, measures are suggested to deal with the "cruise dilemma", including establishing and defining isolation standards on boards, enhancing the capacity of international organizations, the international community's joint response to the pandemic, promoting cooperation between countries, building an effective mechanism for the broad participation of the whole society, and standardizing the release of information and reasonably guiding public social opinion.

Strategic Crisis Response of Shipping Industry in the Post COVID-19 Era: A Case of the Top 10 Shipping Lines

Shipping has played a pivotal role during the epidemic, ensuring that the global logistics functions without disruption. COVID-19 hit various industries around the world, and shipping was no exception. How the shipping industry responds to the crisis and simultaneously shoulders its respective responsibility in the world’s battling the crisis is thus worth exploring in depth. This study takes the top 10 global container shipping capacity liners, which account for 84.7% of the worldwide capacity, as research objects. A corpus for text analysis was constructed collecting press releases and advisories issued on official websites of these 10 container shipping companies from January 2020 to July 2021. Comparison studies were made horizontally among ten shipping companies and longitudinally for crisis evolution patterns into three sub-corpora of Pre/early-Crisis, Crisis-in-Progression, and Post-COVID-19-Era. Quantitative findings were explored and elaborated further under a comprehensive theoretical framework integrating crisis management and communication, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and maritime management (MM). The extracted positive and negative keywords revealed textual characteristics and emergency response strategies on the part of shipping lines in the Pre/early-Crisis, Crisis-in-Progression, and Post-COVID-19-Era. The inclusion of the themes of pursuing sustainability in the shipping lines’ responses to such worldwide crisis as COVID-19 is out of the common knowledge of crisis management but reveals the commitment and strategies on the part of the industry. The findings provide a reasonably comprehensive picture of the efforts made by large container shipping companies to respond to COVID-19 and the measures taken to soothe stakeholders. This paper extends and relearns crisis management, CSR, and MM theories through integrating the fulfilling of cooperate social responsibilities in maritime management as the cooperate crisis responses, thus proposing the integrity of the three topics. Moreover, management recommendations are provided for shipping company management, IMO, and port authorities.

Assessing the Effects of COVID-19 on Restaurant Business From Restaurant Owners' Perspective

Purpose

The main purpose of this study is to assess the effects of COVID-19 on the restaurant businesses of Bangladesh. It examines the socio-economic impacts of the humanitarian disaster of the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of restaurant owners. The study also intends to provide recommendations to mitigate effects on the restaurant business.

Design/Methodology/Approach

A qualitative research approach was adopted to explore the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the restaurant businesses of Bangladesh. A total of 22 in-depth interviews were conducted with the top-ranked restaurant owners in the Rajshahi City Corporation area of Bangladesh. Thematic analysis technique was applied for analyzing the collected data.

Findings

The study found that the restaurant owners were compelled to reduce their number of employees, and forced to ensure social distancing and proper sanitization which increased the expenses. Although online orders and home delivery services have increased significantly, restaurant business operation is gradually turning critical owing to the lack of financial support. Thus, restaurant owners urge the govenrment for financial assistance.

Research Limitations/Implications

Since this research only focused on one city in Bangladesh, the outcomes of study may have a dearth of generalizability. Hence, the investigators are encouraged to extend the study area.

Practical Implications

This study will help restaurant owners and policymakers in formulating contemporary business policies and strategies. Thus, it will be supportive of improving the present condition of the restaurant businesses in developing countries like Bangladesh.

Originality/Value

This paper identified the truculent scenario of the restaurant business during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Legal issues and challenges in addressing the coronavirus outbreak on large cruise ships: A critical examination of port state measures

International cruises have drawn worldwide attention since the outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19). This article first examines the legal issues, challenges and impact of the pandemic on large cruise ships, like the Diamond Princess, and then probes into corresponding pandemic preventive measures which port states employ. A State is obliged under the International Health Regulations 2005 (IHR) to grant foreign cruise ships free pratique, but there is an exception when public health emergencies of international concern occur. Therefore, this article argues that a port state is not obliged to allow foreign cruise ships to dock at its port at the cost of its domestic public health safety. Regarding the Diamond Princess, the Japanese government has undertaken pandemic preventive measures upon passengers on board the ship and complied with its domestic laws, including the Japanese Quarantine Act. This article further evaluates whether a port state's pandemic preventive measures concerning cruise ships are appropriate from the perspective of law. More importantly, it is necessary to consider the characteristics and specialities of international cruise ships to improve future pandemic preventive measures against large passenger ships and cruise passengers.

The Coevolutionary Process of Maritime Management of Shipping Industry in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigates how international organizations, International Maritime Organization (IMO) member states, and associate members have embarked on maritime management (MM) measures to address dire situations in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It explores the evolution of MM practices from international organizations, IMO member states, and associate members to ensure the resilience and sustainability of the shipping industry. Corpus linguistics was employed as a computer-assisted method to assess a large number of naturally occurring texts. Circular letters from international organizations and member states listed on the IMO website from January 2020 to July 2021 were curated and built into three corpora. Through corpus linguistic analysis of circulars from three different crisis phases (Pre-/early-crisis, Crisis in progress, Post-COVID-19 crisis phase), we discovered an MM progression mechanism developed between stakeholders in conjunction with the post-crisis period. The study presented the “MM-as-process” vision to emphasize the time-varying dynamic nature of MM development during the disruption.

A review of early COVID-19 research in tourism: Launching the Annals of Tourism Research's Curated Collection on coronavirus and tourism

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unparalleled impacts to the global tourism industry, thus inspiring a wave of academic research. This paper presents a review of the early literature on COVID-19 and tourism, representing 249 papers. The analysis revealed five key themes: (1) psychological effects and behavior; (2) responses, strategies, and resilience; (3) sustainable futures; (4) impact monitoring, valuation, and forecasting; and (5) technology adoption. However, this research also raises questions about theoretical contribution, methodologies, and future research potential. This article also launches the Annals of Tourism Research's Curated Collection on coronavirus and tourism. The Collection contains all past articles published in Annals of Tourism Research on the topic and will continue to grow as new articles are added.