Cruise embarkation
The FBI wants cruise crime stats. Then what?
The government wants FBI cruise crime stats. But the system is built so almost no one ever hears them.
The FBI has a message for you: As summer vacation season kicks off, cruise passengers who are assaulted, kidnapped, or sexually assaulted at sea should report the crime right away.
That’s the gist of a public service announcement the agency posted to its social media account recently. It’s good advice — of course you should report a crime.
But the FBI left out one teensy detail. Once you say something, chances are nobody outside a windowless federal office will ever know it happened.
Here’s what the government won’t put on a beach-chair graphic on social media: The law that’s supposed to track crime at sea is engineered to make cruising look safer than it is. It lets the accused company act as a gatekeeper for complaints, counts just a sliver of what happens, and whitewashes the details in a generic, anonymized report.
How the cruise industry’s numbers distort the truth about safety
The Cruise Lines International Association, the cruise industry’s trade group, claims cruising is one of the safest vacations in the world. And the federal data seems to agree.
The Department of Transportation posts a quarterly report under the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act, the 2010 law that governs this. It logged just one homicide, one suspicious death and zero kidnappings for all of 2025. The first quarter of this year is also squeaky clean.
Feel safer already? Maybe you shouldn’t.
The data exclude any crime in which the victim isn’t a U.S. citizen, which wipes out nearly every crew member and plenty of passengers. It reports only a short list of the most serious categories. For example, thefts must exceed $10,000 in value to be reportable.
There are other loopholes. Cruise lines must report a physical assault only if it causes “serious bodily injury,” and the law never defines the term. So a physical altercation becomes a judgment call, made by the company with the most to lose.
Is the fox taking inventory of the henhouse?
The FBI is urging passengers to report incidents directly to the cruise line while they’re at sea. But that’s problematic, because the cruise lines then report the crimes to the government.
Let’s think about that arrangement for a moment. A company sells you a “safe” vacation. Then that same company decides whether the thing that happened to you counts as a crime worth reporting. It’s like letting a restaurant grade its own health inspection, and then acting surprised when it gets an A.
The numbers hint at how well that works out. For the last quarter of 2025, for example, Carnival reported only three crimes across its entire fleet of 29 ships. The company’s tally was its lowest since the pandemic shut the industry down. But attorneys who track these cases found at least five reportable crimes on Carnival ships in that same window, including assaults that sent passengers to the hospital.
Do you really believe there were only three serious crimes on a fleet of cruise ships in a three-month period? Neither do I.
The real reason no one is reporting these crimes at sea
The problem isn’t entirely selective reporting or a complicit federal government. It’s the cruise experience itself.
Imagine you’re far from home, in an unfamiliar place, often after a few drinks the ship was delighted to sell you. You can’t call 911 after an incident. The security officer taking your statement works for the company you might one day sue. Witnesses scatter to different hometowns the moment the ship docks. And thanks to the fine print you accepted when you clicked “book,” most disputes get funneled into private arbitration, where the outcome stays sealed.
So where’s the incentive to report a theft or sexual assault? If you say something, there’s a pretty good chance it never becomes public, never gets prosecuted and nothing changes.
The cruise industry created this system when it voluntarily agreed to a weak set of regulations under the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act in 2010. It is enjoying the dividends of your silence every time the system makes reporting feel pointless. There are fewer reports — or none at all — cleaner statistics, and happier cruise line shareholders.
That’s the real scandal behind the FBI’s cheerful summer reminder. They’re begging people to report crimes into a machine designed to process them into a meaningless spreadsheet.
How to fix it
The Cruise Passenger Protection Act, introduced last year in both the House and Senate, would hand oversight to an independent Department of Transportation office instead of the cruise lines, expanding the list of reportable crimes to match what a U.S. city tracks. It would also end the arbitration clauses that keep the records sealed.
Congress should add one more requirement. If a cruise line wants to brag that it’s safer than your hometown, make it release information on every incident to U.S. law enforcement and to the public. The cruise industry should prove its claims.
The bad news is that the bill has been sitting in committee, dead in the water, just like the four or five versions that came before it over the past decade. Congress reintroduces it, the cruise industry lobbies against it, and it sinks.
So enjoy your next cruise. Just remember that if something happens to you at sea, you’ll report it to the same company that decides whether it happened at all.
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Christopher Elliott is the founder of Elliott Advocacy, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that empowers consumers to solve their problems and helps those who can’t. He’s the author of numerous books on consumer advocacy and writes three nationally syndicated columns. He also publishes the Elliott Report, a news site for consumers, and Elliott Confidential, a critically acclaimed newsletter about customer service. If you have a consumer problem you can’t solve, contact him directly through his advocacy website. You can also follow him on X, Facebook, and LinkedIn, or sign up for his daily newsletter.
