A parent’s worst nightmare almost unfolded onboard Carnival Celebration after their teen briefly went missing on the night of December 22, 2024 – but thankfully, the youth has been found safe and sound.
The Excel-class cruise ship is currently in the middle of a 7-night Christmas-themed Western Caribbean sailing that embarked from Miami, Florida, on December 22 – meaning the false alarm took place on the very first night of the voyage.
According to passengers, an announcement was made in the early morning hours of December 23, 2024, as the crew members looked for the missing teenager.
“Early this morning (4am-5am) announcements were made for a missing person. We didn’t stop the ship or slow down. Anyone know if they found the person?,” a current passenger asked on Reddit.
By this point, the approximately 1,735 crew members onboard would have begun enacting emergency protocols – including doing a thorough search of the 183,521-gross ton vessel. No public space or private cabin would have been left unchecked.
At the same time, members of the security team would have been interviewing other members traveling with the missing teen to try to find clues about their whereabouts.
If the missing person wasn’t found, the crew would have likely enacted man-overboard procedures – including launching a search and rescue mission, checking security camera footage in case it captured a missed fall, and contacting relevant authorities.
Luckily, this was a false alarm. While the unidentified teen likely gave their family and the crew quite a scare, they had presumably just fallen asleep in another cabin.
“My husband spoke to a security guard this morning. Said it was a 17 year old who fell asleep in another cabin. It’s a group of people traveling together I guess,” a current guest shared.
“They made an announcement this afternoon that they reunited him with his family,” another passenger confirmed.
Now that the crisis has been averted, the teen, their family, and the other up to 5,374 guests onboard can go back to enjoying their cruise – which will call on Cozumel, Mexico; Costa Maya, Mexico; and Roatan (Mahogany Bay), Honduras.
Missing Persons Cases on Cruise Ships
Going missing on a cruise ship is hard to do – especially considering there is nowhere to really go with the vessel surrounded by the open ocean.
In the past two decades, it’s estimated that only about 200 passengers – which equates to approximately 10 per year – actually go missing from cruise ships. Considering millions of people cruise every single year, this number is quite low.
Between the skilled security teams onboard and security cameras that cover almost every inch of modern cruise ships, any missing person would likely be found very quickly unless they had somehow gone overboard without anyone or any of the sensors noticing.
Read Also: Are Cruises Safe? What You Really Need to Know
But while legitimate missing person cases on cruise ships are few and far between, that doesn’t mean they don’t happen.
In September of 2023, for example, a passenger was reported as missing from Carnival Conquest after failing to debark as scheduled on September 4, 2023.
Search procedures were initiated after the guest, who was identified as Kevin McGrath, went undetected on both onboard surveillance systems and in the US Customs and Border Patrol immigration checks after a 3-night cruise to Bimini, Bahamas.
More than a year later, it’s still unclear what happened to the 26-year-old. While some thought he may have jumped or fallen off the cruise ship, the overboard detection system never went off.
That said, missing persons cases in cruise ports – where guests are separated from their loved ones or accidentally miss their ship – are more common than going missing from the cruise ship itself (but are still rare).
