It starts off as an exercise of anticipation.\u00a0 First comes the softening drinks and teasing morsels which find their mark.\u00a0 The audience at this promotions gig is well heeled, of an age where they have money to burn, but nowhere to burn it.\u00a0 They have not travelled on a luxurious prison of bliss for eighteen months.\u00a0 The world has been ravaged by a pandemic, and they yearn to be ravished by the flavour, surrounds and excitement that is Viking Cruises.<\/p>\n
Cruise liners are not for all but advertise themselves as the unrivalled option of travel for the satisfied life.\u00a0 But every satisfied life comes in gradations, levels, and categories.\u00a0 Pay more and the cabin room expands with magical effort.\u00a0 Pay more and the minibar miraculously replenishes.\u00a0 (Those who opt for the lesser option tend to find themselves having to pay more for other frills and accessories.)\u00a0 The exercise entails an effort to create a microclimate from home: you are away, but you never leave that sacred grove; you are on a journey, but you are still there, with your home comforts.\u00a0 You are, in fact, discouraged of seeing anything new, and anything new is heavily curated, even censored, to remove crinkles and crumples.<\/p>\n
Viking Cruises claim to provide an ultrapure version of that experience.\u00a0 The cruise company, founded by Torstein Hagen, began in 1997 with four ships.\u00a0 The fleet ballooned to 82 vessels to gain primacy over ocean and river cruise routes.\u00a0 New markets were founded with buccaneering enthusiasm.\u00a0 In the 2000s, Hagen sensed an opportunity to lure tourists from the United States to Europe.\u00a0 The Chinese market followed.\u00a0 At the start of 2020, 30,000 Chinese passengers were ready to travel<\/a> with the company.\u00a0 Forget the poor coach operators and the need to use multiple hotels during your journey.\u00a0 Take, instead, to water, your cruising home.<\/p>\n The Scandi flavour is essential.\u00a0 Minimalist d\u00e9cor; warmth and heating in rooms and saunas; ice and stimulation in baths; dining advertised as Scandinavian and American themed.\u00a0 Viking supplies a Nordic version of Ying and Yang, an attempt to awaken and soothe the body.\u00a0 There are also other activities: guest lectures, pursuits of leisure, and tailored cultural excursions that cut out wily middlemen, the proles and most of the locals.\u00a0 There is an unmistakable sense of being in a plush asylum at sea, where the wealthy flirt with change without enduring any, incubated by the narrowest of realities.\u00a0 It is highly filtrated tourism. No riff raff; no queues; no barging.\u00a0 Local flavour and indigenous feeling, eviscerated.<\/p>\n Go behind the gloss, however, and we have a corporate empire that has suffered from occasional villainy and accusation. In November 2019, passengers filed a class action lawsuit<\/a> against Viking River Cruises division, alleging fraud, unjust enrichment and violations of California\u2019s Unfair Competition Law and Consumers Legal Remedies Act.\u00a0 The main claim: that Viking had encouraged passengers to cough up tips for crew members, 10 percent of which were diverted to a tip account.\u00a0 Naughty.<\/p>\n That same year, another class action suit was filed<\/a> alleging that Viking Cruises had \u201csailed through notoriously perilous waters into the path of a Bomb Cyclone where, due to the defendants\u2019 negligence, the vessel lost power leaving the vessel adrift to be battered by high seas and winds as it drifted towards dangerous reefs.\u201d\u00a0 Not the heavily pampered, curated tourist experience the claimants had hoped for.<\/p>\n Then came the novel coronavirus.\u00a0 Cruising on water suddenly seemed less safe.\u00a0 Horror stories were registered about infections at sea with people confined to their cabins.\u00a0 Ships were turned away from harbours as borders closed.\u00a0 In some cases, infected passengers seeded outbreaks.\u00a0 The Diamond Princess<\/em> cruise ship became a public health experiment in real time, its 3,711 passengers and crew members putative lab rats.\u00a0 Epidemiologists were also thrilled at a chance to study the effects of virus in confinement.\u00a0 \u201cCruise ships are like an ideal experiment of a closed population,\u201d Stanford University epidemiologist John Ioannidis told<\/a> Nature<\/em>.<\/p>\n Such experiments cost Hagen, who saw his personal wealth fall<\/a> from $6.28 billion to $2.1 billion.\u00a0 His company had to rely on investments from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, an asset management company, and private equity firm TPG Capital.\u00a0 CPP Investments\u2019 managing director, Bill MacKenzie, was clearly chancing his arm<\/a>.\u00a0 \u201cWhile the pandemic has posed many challenges, we have strong conviction that Viking\u2019s unique global offering in the cruise industry will continue to be sought out by many guests well into the future.\u201d<\/p>\n MacKenzie must have full barrels of conviction, given the losses arising from a global tourist market that went into hibernation in an instant.\u00a0 On March 11, 2020, Viking prided itself in a statement<\/a> as being \u201cthe first cruise line to suspend operations of our river and ocean cruises.\u00a0 Our commitment to our family of guests and employees is that their safety and wellbeing is always our top priority.\u201d\u00a0 Departures for the rest of 2020, and for a good deal of 2021, were also cancelled.\u00a0 The company, in an effort to redress the rot, offered a 125% Future Cruise Voucher to affected customers.<\/p>\n With those realities hovering over the evening\u2019s proceedings at the W Melbourne hotel, there is an air of wishful hope over hard, pandemic worn experience.\u00a0 The two employees of Viking Cruises pushing the cruise product do their best putting on a brave face.\u00a0 They have, at their disposal, videos featuring Hagen, brochures and snappy slide shows.<\/p>\n There is something light about the Norwegian.\u00a0 Hagen appears like an apparition of assurance in these promotions, sedate and softly spoken.\u00a0 The videos feature him praising a brand, and a form of travel, in the time of coronavirus.\u00a0 He insists that his company is ahead of the times: guests will be tested on a daily basis in the least intrusive ways for COVID-19; physical distancing requirements will be policed with rigour.\u00a0 In terms of expertise, he touts the skills of Raquel C. Bono, the company\u2019s newly appointed health officer.<\/p>\n Hiring Bono was very much part of the campaign to assuage customers.\u00a0 The company press<\/a> release from November last year announcing her appointment brims with praise.\u00a0 \u201cA board-certified trauma surgeon and retired Vice Admiral of the United States Navy Medical Corps, Dr Bono most recently led Washington State\u2019s medical and healthcare systems response to the COVID-19 pandemic.\u201d\u00a0 Her appointment also came in the wake of an announcement<\/a> that Viking would \u201cbecome the first cruise line to complete the installation of a full-scale polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing laboratory at sea.\u201d\u00a0 The lab rats could travel with confidence.<\/p>\n After the presentations come the worried questions.\u00a0 They are almost entirely focused on COVID-19.\u00a0 How would it affect future travel?\u00a0 Why bother with bookings that would have to be cancelled?\u00a0 This was tourism as a precarious contingency.\u00a0 The pleasure classes were anxious. \u00a0Those charged with promoting the Viking brand could only point to small guarantees about bookings that could be held over.\u00a0 The rest was merely a case of purchasing tickets and crossing fingers.<\/p>The post Coronavirus Travels and Cruising with Viking<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.\n This post was originally published on Dissident Voice<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It starts off as an exercise of anticipation.\u00a0 First comes the softening drinks and teasing morsels which find their mark.\u00a0 The audience at this promotions gig is well heeled, of an age where they have money to burn, but nowhere to burn it.\u00a0 They have not travelled on a luxurious prison of bliss for eighteen [\u2026]<\/p>\n The post Coronavirus Travels and Cruising with Viking<\/a> first appeared on Dissident Voice<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[937,175,304,751],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173904"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173904"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173997,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173904\/revisions\/173997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}