Good morning, afternoon, evening
Before anything else, here’s some news that I’m delighted to share – as some of you know, we’ve had one of our crew members from Queen Victoria (QV) with Covid-19 on a ventilator in Southampton General Hospital for quite a number of weeks. His condition has been critical at times. Well, he’s now recovered enough to come off the ventilator and has moved to the general ward. Here’s wishing him a swift recovery and ultimately a safe journey home to family in the Philippines.
This week we announced the latest pause extension… a huge thank you goes to everyone who has been involved. Each of these pauses is a massively cross functional effort and involves an awful lot of planning and coordination. This pause has been the smoothest yet. Queen Mary 2 (QM2) and QV are now paused up to and including sailing on 1 November (taking QM2 up to her scheduled dry-dock) and Queen Elizabeth (QE) until 23 November (taking her to the start of her Australian season).
We’re continuing repatriation of crew from all three of our ships and good progress is being made, albeit it is slower than any of us would like. All Filipino colleagues from QE are now safely ashore and on their way to their families and loved ones. I should acknowledge the patience of all the crew onboard QE – the final 23 Filipino crew members to disembark had been in isolation on the ship for a whopping 44 days by the time we managed to secure their safe passage home. We do still have a number of crew to repatriate to all corners of the world – so we’re not quite there yet.
On QV, currently off the coast near Weymouth, we still have several hundred Filipino crew members onboard. We’ve had a few false starts with charter flights being booked only to then get cancelled. It’s immensely frustrating – especially so for those affected of course.
On QM2, also just off the coast near Weymouth, we’re in a much better position, having just over 200 crew members onboard. Like the other two Queens however, there is ongoing repatriation to many, many countries around the world.
For those of you who follow our social media (please start if you don’t – it’s never too late!), you will have seen a lot of comment from Guests who are frustrated about the length of time it is taking to get them refunds. I just want to assure you that we are doing all we can to get people refunds quickly and we are now averaging 35 days, so well below the 60 days we had communicated. There are, as ever, still some outliers that we are working really hard to resolve.
Take care, look after yourselves and have a good weekend.