Passenger Accounting: The Accuracy of the Roll-Call after Costa Concordia

SOLAS Regulation III/8 (Muster list and emergency instructions) as the procedural basis; Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act (CVSSA), United States: obligation to report every disappearance to the competent authorities (Coast Guard, FBI for US citizens), regardless of the status of investigations, with public quarterly reports from the Department of Transportation, a series still being published.

The duty to count, however, is not in III/8. It is in SOLAS Regulation III/27, Information on passengers, worth reading in full because it is short and is invariably quoted from memory. Paragraph 1: “All persons on board all passenger ships shall be counted prior to departure”. Paragraph 2: details of persons who have declared a need for special care or assistance in emergency situations are recorded and communicated to the master prior to departure. Paragraph 3: “Not later than 1 January 1999, the names and gender of all persons on board, distinguishing between adults, children and infants shall be recorded for search and rescue purposes”. Paragraph 4: that information “shall be kept ashore and made readily available to search and rescue services when needed”. Paragraph 5: Administrations may exempt ships from paragraph 3 where their scheduled voyages make keeping such records impracticable.

Three observations that head off three errors. The date “Not later than 1 January 1999” in paragraph 3 is not a leftover from an old edition: it is in the text in force, a spent transitional date never tidied out. Readers sometimes conclude they are holding a superseded version of the Convention, and need reassuring.

Second: III/27 requires neither nationality nor date of birth. It asks for name, gender and the adult/child/infant distinction. Nationality is a European requirement, not an IMO one: it comes from Directive 98/41/EC as amended by Directive (EU) 2017/2109, which for voyages exceeding 20 miles to the next port of call requires family names, forenames, gender, nationality and dates of birth, and prescribes their electronic transmission to the National Single Window within fifteen minutes of departure. III/27.4, by contrast, is content that the information be «kept ashore and made readily available».

Third: III/27 binds passenger ships on international voyages; 98/41/EC applies to ships operating to or from ports of Member States, including the domestic voyages SOLAS does not reach. For a ship trading in Europe the two regimes stack, and the more demanding one is the European.

The articles of Directive 98/41/EC that impose concrete duties on board are worth reading. Article 4(1): “All persons on board any passenger ship which departs from a port located in a Member State shall be counted before that passenger ship departs”. Article 4(2) adds that the number is communicated to the master and reported in the single window. Article 5(1) sets the threshold — voyages where the distance from the point of departure to the next port of call exceeds 20 miles — and the data list: “the family names of the persons on board, their forenames, their gender, their nationality, their dates of birth”, plus volunteered information on special care or assistance in an emergency and, if the Member State so chooses, an emergency contact number. Article 5(2) requires those data to be reported in the single window on departure and “in no case later than 15 minutes after its departure”: fifteen minutes, not «as soon as practicable».

Article 8 assigns responsibility: each company appoints a passenger registrar, responsible for reporting the information in the single window, and ensures that information on persons who have declared a need for assistance is “properly recorded and communicated to the master before the passenger ship departs”. Data are kept only until the voyage has been safely completed and reported, then erased “automatically and without undue delay”: an obligation to delete, not an option.

Two dates that make many procedures still in use obsolete. Directive (EU) 2017/2109 allowed a six-year transitional period from 20 December 2017 during which data could be communicated to the company's passenger registrar or shore-based system instead of the single window. That period expired on 20 December 2023: the alternative route no longer exists. And the Directive's reference to «Directive 2010/65/EU» is now a reference to a repealed act: the single window today is that of Regulation (EU) 2019/1239, establishing the European Maritime Single Window environment (EMSWe).