Cruise line Royal Caribbean on July 23rd unveiled a new cruise ship smoking policy, set to go into effect next January 1, which seems likely to leave many smokers and many non-smokers unhappy.

The policy, which will initially take effect aboard 18 of Royal Caribbean's 21 ships including all of its newest and largest, will turn all staterooms and one lounge on the cruise line's ships into non-smoking areas. The remaining ships will fall into line next summer.

Currently, smoking is prohibited in guest hallways and corridors,
restaurants, some entertainment venues and most of the ship's interior public spaces except for designated areas in bars and lounges.

While the addition of new non-smoking areas seemed, on its face, to be good news for non-smokers, the bad news came in disclosure that smokers would still be able to light-up on stateroom and suite balconies.

One of the current complaints of non-smokers is they often are driven from balconies -- for which they pay extra -- by smokers on adjacent balconies. The new no-smoking-in-staterooms policy seems certain to drive even more smokers onto cabin balconies.

"Now I will never be able to sit out on the balcony," one non-smoking cruiser emailed Cruise Ship Report after hearing today's Royal Caribbean announcement.

Nevertheless, Royal Caribbean's further move toward curtailing smoking on its cruise ships has to be viewed as little short of courageous, given the lack of success Carnival had only a few years ago with its non-smoking cruise ship, the Paradise.

Only Disney and Oceania currently ban smoking in staterooms, and Disney allows smoking on stateroom balconies while Oceania bans smoking on verandahs.

Royal Caribbean said violations of the smoking policy will result in a $250 charge being added to the guest's onboard account and repeated problems may be incur escalating penalties that include the possibility of smokers being put off the ship at the next port.

"Results from online polls as well as input from all of our international offices worldwide, show very strong support of the new smoking policy," said Alice Norsworthy, senior vice president, Marketing, Royal Caribbean International.

"These changes reflect a more contemporary approach to healthier lifestyles and will significantly improve the cruise vacation experience for our guests."

In one incident, the Coast Guard said it rescued a 29-year-old man about an hour after he went overboard from the Carnival Liberty just before midnight while the ship was 50 miles off the coast of Boca Raton, FL. Authorities said the man appeared to be intoxicated.

In the other incident, an 18-year-old youth who had survived a brutal beating with a pipe last year was observed jumping over the railing of the upper deck of Carnival's Ecstasy early Sunday morning while the ship was 200 miles from shore in the Gulf of Mexico.

The ship's crew recovered the youth's body from the water about a half hour later and he was pronounced dead at 9:10 a.m.

The two incidents dramatize what appears to be a growing problem: nary a month goes by now without extensive news coverage of one or more plunges from a cruise ship. Earlier this year, three passengers went overboard from cruise ships in just one week.

While most of the jumps or falls from cruise ships appear to involve over-consumption of alcohol, a number of less publicized incidents appear to involving persons choosing this method of suicide.

Unfortunately, it is not immediately obvious how cruiselines can reduce the number of incidents. In most cases, balcony railings are high enough to render an accidental fall virtually impossible.

One approach may be to intensify efforts to get out the message that while some jumpers survive, in most cases they are recovered floating face down -- or as with a passenger who went overboard from Liberty of the Seas a week ago, the body is never found.

Crew members aboard the Liberty threw life-rings and jackets over the side. Coast Guard crews located the man about an hour later.

It's not clear yet if the 29-year-old man from Maryland suffered any injuries.

Alaska voters in last August's primary election approved a variety of new levies on cruise ships including a 33 percent tax on gross gambling revenues of cruise ship casinos while they are in Alaska waters.

Draft regulations for the gambling tax are still being written with the hope that they can be adopted early this fall, and tentative plans call for the the payment of this tax to be due each year on April 15.

While guesses as to how much the state will receive from the cruise line gambling tax have ranged around $15 million, “Nobody can really handicap how much money will come in on gambling,” said Joe Geldhof, a Juneau attorney who helped draft the initiative.

Several cruise lines have told us they are not inviting groups of casino "high-rollers" on Alaska cruise junkets this summer as a result of the tax they would have to pay to the state if these cruises proved profitable to the cruiseline.

Alaska state officials also have expressed some concern about how they will verify taxable gaming revenue.

“The question of how we're going to audit that is yet to be determined,” said Jerry Burnett, legislative liaison for the Revenue Department, told the Alaska Journal of Commerce.

“I'm assuming these are reputable corporate operators, and they're going to tell the truth,” Burnett added, but he also suggested it is “likely that we will have to do some kind of test to determine if they are reasonable. I think we may have to send an observer (on board).”

Meanwhile, the other tricky issue is how to calculate exactly how much money is won or lost on cruise ships in Alaska state waters -- the only time the income is subject to the tax.

When ships are in so-called donut holes —areas in larger channels that are more than three miles from any shoreline such as the Southeast panhandle's Inside Passage -- they are exempt from the tax, according to John Shively, a spokesman for Holland America Lines.

“It's a problem. Things don't just turn on and off when you cross a line. My guess is the state's going to have to come up with some kind of proxy system, based on the time we're in Alaska waters,” Shively said.