Cruise Lines Likely to Restrict Number of Free Drinks on Beverage Packages Soon After $300,000 Carnival Judgment

If you have been following cruise news lately you may have seen the story that is making the rounds and it is a real doozy. A woman aboard a Carnival cruise ship was served 15 shots of tequila, then wandered into a crew-only area, and fell down a staircase passed out drunk. She sued Carnival Cruise Lines and a court awarded her $300,000!

Let that “sink” in for a moment (no pun intended).

Now I want to be fair here. If crew members did knowingly keep serving someone who was clearly in no condition to keep drinking, that is a real problem and the cruise line does bear some responsibility for that. Responsible service of alcohol is a thing and it matters on ships or up in the air. Here is the thing though, bar staff have the ability to see on their screens how many drinks have been served to a given passenger on their package. So the information is there if they want to look.

The problem is that bar staff on a busy cruise ship are absolutely rushing around trying to keep up with a large number of impatient passengers all wanting drinks at the same time. It is easy to see how a warning sign gets missed in that kind of chaos. Maybe the smarter solution here is not to punish all passengers by lowering the drink cap per “day” but instead for the cruise lines to invest in software that automatically flags and warns bar staff when a passenger is being served too many drinks too fast. That kind of guardrail could actually prevent a situation like this from happening again. But seriously, 15 shots of tequila? That is not a situation where someone sneaks up on you. That is a choice that was made over and over again, drink by drink, by the individual.

What makes this case even more troubling is that the critical security footage covering the window of time between the passenger’s last drink and being found at the bottom of that staircase was never shown at trial. Not because it did not exist but because Carnival admitted they had seen it and simply chose not to preserve it, claiming they did not think it was important. A jury of eight women saw right through that and it is hard to blame them. Carnival has said it plans to appeal the verdict.

Here is why this story matters to every single one of us who cruises and buys a drink package. When something like this happens and a cruise line gets hit with a $300,000 judgment, you better believe the bean counters and lawyers in the corporate offices are having some very serious meetings. And what comes out of those meetings almost always rolls downhill straight to us, the paying passengers. I fully expect that we will start seeing cruise lines quietly cap the number of drinks allowed per day on beverage packages and some lines that currently have no cap at all may suddenly find themselves adding one for the first time. And while a set number of drinks in 24 hours sounds like a lot on paper there is a real-world cruise scenario where drink counts add up fast and it has nothing to do with getting hammered. Let me explain.

Think about a hot sea day in the Caribbean. You are out on deck in 90-degree heat and humidity. You order a frozen rum punch or a piña colada, it sits in the sun and half of it melts into watery mush before you even get halfway through it. So you toss it and order another because you have a drink package so why not, right? Then you grab a soda or a beer with lunch. Then a glass of wine with dinner. Then a nightcap at the bar or show before bed. Before you know it you have had six or seven “drinks” but your actual alcohol consumption was maybe the equivalent of two or three real drinks because half of them were mostly ice water by the time you got to them. That is just the reality of cruising in warm weather and it should not be penalized but I fear it is on the way and on the way soon!

So here we are. Because of one person’s choices and one court’s poor decision to reward those choices with $300,000, the rest of us may soon be watching a little counter tick down on our drink packages and cutting us off before the night is even over. Cruise lines have always reserved the right to cut off passengers they feel have had too much and that is completely reasonable. Let’s hope the cruise lines find a smarter solution but I am not holding my breath. – René