Florida Gov. Threatens Legal Action Over Cruise Restart

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has had enough.

DeSantis and Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody said Friday that unless federal regulators step in and help overturn the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conditional sail order, they will resort to legal action.

“Sometimes, that means we have to push back against our own government,” Moody said during a roundtable discussion on the cruise industry at Port Canaveral’s Cruise Terminal 3. “We’ve got to start examining some very serious options.”

DeSantis and Moody were joined on the forum panel by Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Kevin Thibault and Port Canaveral Chief Executive Officer John Murray, according to Florida Today.

Major cruise lines have not sailed out of U.S. ports for more than a year now. The pandemic caused the CDC to issue a no-sail order but then changed it in October of 2020 to a ‘conditional sailing’ order filled with extensive guidelines that cruise lines must meet in order to sail again.

But DeSantis argued that much has happened in the last five months since the conditional sail order, including vastly improved health and safety plans implemented by the cruise lines as well as three different vaccinations now in use.

Although various travel entities, including the Cruise Lines International Association and the American Society of Travel Advisors, have lobbied hard for a July 1 restart, the CDC has said it is holding firm on a Nov. 1 date.

“When you have a government that is working against the interests, the vitality, the success of the citizens that it serves, that is a problem. You cannot have an agency shutting down an entire industry, based on outdated, arbitrary, capricious decisions,” Moody said. “And so we will take all legal action, as necessary, Gov. DeSantis, working with your office, basing that on the information given to us, not only by the cruise line industry, but those that have been impacted in Florida.”