The death toll from the accident on Friday was 11, though at least 24 people were still missing after the ship, carrying 4,200 passengers and crew members, hit rocks and capsized hundreds of feet off Giglio Island, in Italy.
Shares of Carnival fell $4.68, to $29.60 on Tuesday in New York. That followed a similar drop in London the previous day, when markets in the United States were closed for Martin Luther King’s Birthday.
Carnival, which is based in Miami and London, owns 101 cruise ships and has 85,000 employees around the world.
Analysts said the accident could not have happened at a worse time for the industry, which carries more than 13 million passengers each year. January is the beginning of the so-called wave season, a period when cruise lines typically book a third to half of their reservations for the entire year.
Cruise companies were hoping for a rebound this year after a sluggish season last year because of the slow global economy and high fuel prices. Still, the cruise industry was not expecting to see much growth, even before the accident, according to a report Sunday by Standard Poor’s.
Gregory Badishkanian, an analyst at Citigroup, said he had seen indications of a 6 to 10 percent decline in cruise bookings after the tragedy.
“The pictures and the videos from the Costa tragedy are more graphic and widespread than past incidents,” he said in a note to investors. But he added that such volatility was not unexpected.
While cruise operators froze their advertising over the weekend, analysts and travel agents said the industry was not likely to suffer long-term consequences despite the effect of the images.
“There is no major passenger fear of cruising thus far,” Mr. Badishkanian said.
Neil Gorfain, the chief executive of the Cruise Outlet, an online national booking agency that specializes in cruises, said he had not seen any cancellations. “The public has a short memory. We might have some concern for a few weeks. But so far, we have had no fallout.”
The effect on the Carnival Corporation is harder to gauge at this point, although it has the wherewithal to shoulder the financial cost of the accident.
On Monday, Carnival said that its lost earnings this year from the grounding of the Costa Concordia would be $85 million to $95 million. It also anticipated “other costs to the business that are not possible to determine at this time,” which might include future cancellations, for instance, or possible liabilities. In addition, the company said it might have to pay $30 million in deductibles to cover damage to the ship, and a $10 million deductible for personal injury liability and cleanup costs.
The cost to insurers, on the other hand, might be substantial, depending on the vessel’s fate.
One analyst with Numis Securities in London has estimated total liability at $800 million if the ship were scrapped. This would make it the largest marine loss on record, exceeding the $500 million that insurers paid after the 1989 grounding of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker in Alaska, according to a report by Bloomberg News. The ship is insured by a group of firms, including Assicurazioni Generali, the RSA Insurance Group and the XL Group, it said.
Carnival was founded in 1972 by Ted Arison, with a single ship sailing between Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The company is now run by the founder’s son, Mickey Arison, and carries eight million passengers a year, 60 percent of them from the United States, on cruises throughout the world.
Carnival, which has twice as many ships and employees as the second-largest cruise line operator, Royal Caribbean Cruises, reported revenues of $14.5 billion in its 2010 fiscal year.
Under Mickey Arison, the company has been one of the top drivers of the industry’s consolidation in the last decade. It now owns 10 brands, including the Carnival Cruise Lines, its largest subsidiary with 23 ships; Princess Cruises; and the Holland American Line. Its other subsidiaries include PO Cruises and Cunard.
Its Costa Cruises unit has 15 ships that operate mainly in Europe, and account for 16 percent of Carnival’s global capacity. The company has 10 ships on order, including two planned for Costa.
So far, Mr. Arison, who also owns the Miami Heat of the N.B.A., has taken a low-key position, allowing the head of his Italian subsidiary to handle the accident’s fallout. That executive, Pier Luigi Foschi, has blamed the ship’s captain for performing an unauthorized maneuver.
Public comments on cruise-related Web sites offered a mixed picture. One commenter on CruiseCritic.com, Christine Crossingham, said the accident had not dented her enthusiasm to board the MSC Fantasia, of Italy’s MSC Cruises, in March. It is one of the world’s largest ships with nearly 300,000 square feet of public space.
“This is evidently human error,” she wrote. “There are thousands of cruises going every day out somewhere.”
Another, Ralph Summers, said he would not cruise the Mediterranean Sea. “I’ll stick to the Caribbean thank you.”
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