TORONTO -- The cruise industry has been hit hard by COVID-19, with travel bans and virus fears colliding in a perfect storm.

In 2019, the cruise industry was worth about US$150 billion and was projected to carry 32 million passengers in 2020. But the arrival of COVID-19 has forced the industry to virtually collapse.

At the beginning of March, the Canadian government announced that cruise ships were banned from coming to Canada until at least July. Since then, the ban has been extended until the end of February 2021.

Travel experts say the Canadian ban will likely have little effect on the industry as the peak season for Canadian cruise ship vacations usually begins around April and extends through the summer until the end of October.

When asked if the industry could recover from a devastating year and an uncertain future, travel journalist David Yeskel pointed to Europe’s plan to resume cruise lines.

“In Europe, for the last couple of months there have been two large cruise ships operating: MSC Cruises and Costa Cruises, largely without incident,” Yeskel told CTV’s Your Morning on Monday. “They kind of set this template about how to do cruising safely in this age and that’s going to be moved forward to other lines for cruising around the world.”

In the United States, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have given permission for cruise lines to begin to sail again, under strict conditions.

The CDC’s “Framework for Conditional Sailing Order for Cruise Ships” requires cruise lines to test crew and future passengers at regular intervals and when anyone embarks or disembarks. They must also first carry out a simulated mock trip to show they can operate safely.

“There’s a lot of hoops they need to jump through,” Yeskel says. “Once cruising starts from U.S. ports, hopefully by the spring, that’ll prompt a reopening of the Canadian ports by summer to facilitate cruises to Alaska and the Maritimes.”

The CDC was prompted to issue no-sail orders for the cruise ship industry following an outbreak on the Diamond Princess ship which had to be docked in Japan for multiple weeks as passengers quarantined in their cabins. More than 700 people onboard the ship tested positive for COVID-19, leading to nine deaths.

Since then, cruise lines have been singled out as COVID-19 hotspots for bringing together thousands of passengers and crew from around the world into close quarters where social distancing is hard to maintain.

“We’ve pretty much seen the end of the self-service buffet,” Yeskel says of the new guidelines put out by the CDC. “We may only see 25 per cent passenger capacity on the initial cruises, just so they can maintain the distancing and the health requirements.”

He added, “We should remember these are interim steps. These will go on for as long as they need to go on to keep everybody safe and healthy. But I think once there is a widely available vaccine and/or sure-fire therapeutic, things will slowly return to normal and some of these restrictions will be lifted.”