Help! My Ship Is Supposedly Still Sailing, and I Don’t Want to Be On Board

Although certain small ships have resumed operations this summer, most ocean vessels that sail to or from United States ports are suspended through Sept. 30, according to the C.D.C.’s extended No Sail Order. Still, many cruise lines are delaying their relaunch date even further. Cunard is paused until November. Carnival Cruise Line has already canceled some sailings into 2021.

So, yes, because cruising is a mess right now, it’s not totally unreasonable to be anxious about what next spring will look like.

To win back consumer confidence, maintain cash flow and assure the safety of future passengers and crew members, the cruising industry needs to take massive action. Companies say they are hammering out health protocols and testing upgrades like ultraviolet technologies and H.V.A.C. systems. Meanwhile, docked ships and blank passenger manifests have created a revenue crunch, and certain lines are downsizing their fleets accordingly. Schedules continue to change; as a result, customer-service channels are churning in overdrive.

“We’ve seen lines cancel their sailings in small batches — usually a couple of months at a time — in an effort to process fewer cancellations at once, but they’re still dealing with far more booking adjustments than they’re used to en masse,” said Colleen McDaniel, the editor in chief of Cruise Critic, a major cruise-planning website.

Perhaps fitting for an industry that’s so in flux, reader complaints about cruise refunds and credits have felt especially bizarre. One woman was told by a cruise line customer-service representative that in order to get a refund, she would need to stop posting complaints about the company on Twitter. (She didn’t; that’s how I found her.) Another was asked to prepay for a cruise a full 33 months in advance — highly unusual for a system that runs on deposits and final payments. (One cruise-editor friend, upon hearing these anecdotes, deemed them a good “alarm for the industry” about how customer-service reps are trained.)