Listed and checked: Australia’s cruise fleet is best for health with no outbreaks

• NSW’s latest cruise health reporting shows a remarkably successful story.
• Even with around a million passengers passing through the state throughout the 2025/26 season, there were no dangerous or serious outbreaks onboard ships.
• This stands in stark contrast to the USA, where they have been 32 outbreaks through 2025 and 2026.

NSW didn’t just wrap up an extremely successful season of cruise, but also an exceptionally healthy and well-managed one. Despite an estimated one million cruise passengers passing through NSW on 316 cruise ships, no ‘Level two’ outbreaks of Covid-19, gastrointestinal illness or influenza were recorded across all ships.

Level two refers to when more than three per cent of passengers become infected, and the only incidence of this all season was when a respiratory illness infected about 3.5 per cent of passengers on a cruise. 

This stands in stark contrast to the USA, where in 2025 there were 23 registered gastrointestinal outbreaks, and there are nine already registered this year. This is measured using the same three per cent threshold. This incidence of outbreaks has occurred after the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had its budget cut by about 40-50%. 

What Australia doesn’t have is standardised national reporting, which is something the government should look to establish.

The one stage that does is NSW, which sees by far the most cruise passengers of any state. It does have a thorough system for inspections, monitoring and reporting. All cruise ships that visit the Overseas Passenger Terminal or White Bay in Sydney, as well as Eden, Newcastle and Athol Bay, are subject to reporting and general inspections.

Perhaps the most impressive data to note in NSW’s results is not only was there no gastroenteritis ‘Level two’ outbreak, but the incidence of gastroenteritis cases never even went above two per cent on a NSW cruise.

What likely led to such a successful season health-wise is the thorough inspection process which ships that sail in NSW are subject to. The inspection measures across 10 different areas, including hygiene and hand washing, kids club and childcare facilities, waste management, cleaning equipment and linen and more.

Not all vessels are able to be inspected, but they are ranked by order of importance and priority to ensure the most high-risk vessels are inspected. These may be those that carry the most passengers or that have had outbreaks in the past, or that for any other reason are viewed as high priority by NSW health.

As the table below shows, all inspected ships passed their inspections successfully.

Beauty salons

You may notice that several cruise ships in the above table failed their inspections only in ‘skin penetration’. This generally refers to the equipment and techniques used in beauty salons for procedures such as manicures and pedicures. 

The reason for the failure likely is because Australian regulations for these types of beauty salons are different to those found in other countries. 

However, the report notes that “corrective actions” were given to ships that didn’t pass the ‘skin penetration’ portion of their inspection.

“Seven vessels were provided with corrective action around skin penetration activities.
“It is noted that there are ongoing challenges with beauty spas. As found in the previous three years (2022/ 23, 2023/ 24 and 2024/ 25), a common theme from the inspections was that some beauty spas had suboptimal practices. These beauty spas were all sub-contracted to external providers. In each instance the deficiencies were highlighted to the ship’s Captain / Master and remedial action implemented.”

Improving figures 

The other great news about these figures is that they show a strong year-on-year improvement with the 2024/25 cruise season in NSW.

Throughout the 2024/25 season, which had a similar number of overall ships and passengers, there were four ‘Level two’ outbreaks of acute respiratory infection, as well as two case of gastro outbreaks, which were both significant outbreaks with levels of six per cent and 11 per cent respectively. 

The season before had four acute respiratory infection outbreaks, one gastro outbreak and seven Covid outbreaks, with the 2023/24 season landing on the tail-end of the pandemic. 

This season shows the results that come with continued and thorough reporting, with incidences of any kind of outbreaks dropping right down.

While cruise ships are sometimes painted with the reputation of even being ‘floating petri-dishes’, most data shows it’s a very safe holiday, especially in places like New South Wales.