How Do Cruise Ships Avoid Storms?

Cruise ships are designed to handle rough seas and can be rerouted to avoid danger. They are built to withstand storms, avoid them, and even outrun them. Cruise companies follow the weather carefully, changing itineraries, canceling sailings, and working hard to adapt to catastrophic weather and natural disasters. Cruise ships move about twice as fast as the storms themselves, so they can either outrun the storms or simply go around storm cells. If a storm is threatening the area a ship was scheduled to sail to, cruise lines will reroute the ships if the forecast is severe enough.

While cruise ships typically outrun most storms, passengers may still experience rough seas as their ship skirts the edges of a weather system. Advanced technology and safety measures help cruise ships avoid or minimize bad weather by changing their itineraries either in advance or at the last minute. A cruise ship may return to port ahead of storms, and they are equipped with state-of-the-art weather forecasting equipment, enabling them to anticipate and navigate around storms and rough seas.

Typically, it is safe for cruise ships to depart the home port while a hurricane is occurring in the Caribbean, as long as the hurricane is not severe enough. Cruise lines will reroute ships by hundreds of miles to avoid tropical storms and hurricanes, but it doesn’t mean you can always expect smooth sailing.