Question

Scenario:

With several coronavirus COVID-19 outbreaks on cruise ships around the world, such as Hong Kong, Japan, Egypt and USA, the confident level took a further hit as the US Department of State issued advice on 8 March for U.S. citizens to stay away from cruise ship. While the international cruise industry will be expecting a bitter winter in the coming months, the Hong Kong cruise industry is even on a complete halt. Cruise Line International Association suggested its member cruise lines to ban all passengers who are travelling from Hong Kong. All together these made Hong Kong’s still developing cruise industry suffers yet another blow.  

Your tasks:

In view of these challenges, you are required to critically evaluate the current impact to the Hong Kong cruise industry, and suggest a revival plan once the bans are lifted. In your essay, you should include:

• A summary of current situation
• Identify the challenges faced by the industry now, you may compare it with the 2003 SARS outbreak
• Suggestions to revive the industry in short, medium and long term

Answer 1

Answer:

Cruise line is the line generally used for passengers travel from one international port to another international port. Hong Kong has a big cruise line for international passenger travels and they have large business around the cruise line. They support for the travel of various foreign travelers from various countries.

Current situation for Hong Kong Cruise line: The current condition of the Hong Kong cruise line is not good and they are in bad condition as they do not have any business for the cruise segment. The cruise line is a key business segment for the Hong Kong and they are not able to run it due to the Covid-19 scenario. Thus their cruise line business in on hold and they are not able to make any earning from it in spite they are managing the expense for managing the cruise line business.

‘Evaluation of the current impact to the Hong Kong cruise industry: The current impact to the Hong Kong cruise line is that this line is in a bad condition. It is not been able to operate due to covid-19 issue and it will not be able to run for long time in near future. Thus the investment for the cruise line will be not resulting in return and the investors of the cruise line will be having loss for the investments. The cruise line will be losing their investors and shareholders, their share value will be dropping significantly. Overall it will be a major loss for the Hong Kong cruise line and it will create major financial problem for the Hong Kong Cruise line. The cruise line will be required to make payment to their employees or Hong Kong Cruise line will lose their key skilled resources and it will impact to the cruise line business in long term.

Identify the challenges faced by the industry now with compare it with the 2003 SARS outbreak is that it will have major financial problem that will have significant impact to the Hong Kong cruise line business. It will lose investors because it will face a long term challenge of restart of the cruise business and looks difficult to restart as people will not get the confidence of using cruise line for their travel, unless covid-19 is completely removed, which is not possible in near future.

Suggesting a revival plan once the bans are lifted: Once the bans are lifted then the suggestions will be as below

· Short Term: In short term Hong Kong cruise line need to be prepared for small run of cruise line operations so that they can easily manage the operation at lowest possible cost.

· Medium Term: In the medium term, they need to focus on steady increase of the cruise line operation with managing the costing in the proportion of earnings.

· Long term: In the long term they need to focus to have full flesh operation as earlier with making adequate readiness for the cruise line operations.