Princess Cruises Ship Power Outage

On Sunday night, the Emerald Princess, which is one of the ships owned and operated by Princess Cruises, experienced a power outage that left the ship at a standstill for over 4 hours. The cruise line says that they still haven’t figured out what caused the incident.

At about 6:30pm Sunday, the 3,080 passenger ship lost power. This was only 90 minutes after the vessel set sail for a 7-night cruise to the Caribbean from Fort Lauderdale. The passengers were left spending much of the evening with limited services and lighting, as well as no air conditioning, for the duration of the incident. It was about 11pm before the power turned back on, but due to the problem, the scheduled Princess Cays call, which is the company’s private beach in the Bahamas, on Monday was skipped.

In a statement, Princess Cruises says that they are still looking into why the power went out. A technician will be joining the vessel in St. Maarten on Wednesday to help determine the exact cause, they continued, with a computer glitch thought to be the culprit. They added that there was never any danger threatening the crew, passengers or ship.

The company says that they also plan to compensate passengers for missing out on Princess Cays. They said that they recognize the cancellation is disappointing. Once they have determined the cause of the issue and can assess the impact on the itinerary, they will give an update about the compensation, they added. The ship is due to return to Fort Lauderdale on August 1.