Cruise ships have become stranded off coastlines around the globe. Passengers and crew, desperate to get off, are being rejected by ports which don't want them. The coronavirus crisis could spell the end of the line for an entire industry which has become the butt of much criticism. But this is not news; the cruise business has long been called out for its social, health and environmental problems. By Freya Higgins-Desbiolles.

Adelaide, April 2020. The business model at the root of criticisms of the cruise ship industry has to do with flags of convenience. This means ships operate in waters far from their "home" ports; most are registered in Caribbean tax havens.

This in turn means that operating outside clear jurisdictions, cruise staff and crew wages are low, and working conditions often poor. Indeed, that so many ships have become floating coronavirus incubators also indicates poor standards of health and safety protocols. Emergency plans for infectious outbreaks seem obvious things to have – yet several reports of recent incidents suggest hasty, improvised responses. Now, flags of convenience have become an existential threat to crew, and the industry itself.

The industry's reputational crisis has been highlighted in Australia, where a significant number of the nation's 60-plus confirmed COVID-19 deaths so far have come from cruise ships. At least 15 deaths (and more than 660 infections — about 10% of Australia's total) have been linked to just one ship, the Ruby Princess.

The Ruby Princess has since been allowed to dock at Port Kembla, south of Sydney, with a fifth of more than 1,000 crew quarantined aboard showing virus-like symptoms.

Another cruise ship, the Artania, has been in a weeks-long stand-off in West Australian waters; most of the ship's passengers were allowed to disembark to charter flights to Europe but more than 400, mostly crew, remain on board - potentially infected. West Australian Premier Mark McGowan told the operators that he would: “like (the Artania) to leave, we don't want you in our port." It is a terrible situation.

But who is responsible? The Artania is owned by British cruise line P&O, chartered to a German company, operates out of Frankfurt and is registered in the Bahamas.

Similarly, the Ruby Princess operates out of Australia but is registered in Bermuda, and owned by Princess Cruises which is headquartered in California but incorporated in Bermuda. Both P&O and Princess Cruises are subsidiaries of Carnival Corporation, whose combined fleet of about 300 ships carries almost half the world's cruising passengers. Carnival Corporation is headquartered in Miami, as are the second and third biggest cruise corporations, Royal Caribbean and Norwegian. But Carnival is incorporated in Panama, Norwegian in Bermuda, and Royal Caribbean in Liberia – all home to flags of convenience.

And equally worryingly, more than two-thirds (by tonnage) of all cruise ships fly the flags of just three (convenience) nations — the Bahamas, Panama and Bermuda.

This makes the cruise ship industry one of the world's least regulated, with owners and operators able to skirt normal first-world workplace, health, safety and environmental rules. Crew, particularly those in "lower level" service jobs that come from countries like Bangladesh, the Philippines and Nepal, put up with poor pay and conditions on every trip while passengers pay thousands of dollars for luxury pampering on the upper decks.

Long before the current crisis, the cruise ship industry was being criticised for its wider social and environment problems. As the industry made more than $100 billion and pampered a record 26 million-plus customers last year, some ships generated an estimated 210,000 gallons of human sewage and 1million gallons of graywater from sinks, baths, showers, laundry and galleys every week. Just last year Carnival paid $US20 million ($28 million) to settle a US court case over its ships dumping rubbish in the ocean — something for which it has a previous criminal conviction. Cruising has also contributed to over-tourism in places like Barcelona, Reykjavik, Dubrovnik and Venice. Its environmental record is appalling.

Currently, industry analysts say the big cruise operators have enough reserves to last six months. After that, if they don't secure funding, they face going out of business. And if that happens, many will not mourn the loss.

Now the industry's carefully honed image of cruise ships offering the right balance between fun and security looks totally sunk; whatever remains after this crisis will need a complete and long-awaited overhaul.

Freya Higgins-Desbiolles is senior lecturer in tourism management at University of South Australia. This article originally appeared on The Conversation.