Cunard’s Queen Anne cruise ship advised passengers to remain cautious while the ship passed through a piracy-prone area in Southeast Asia, according to a Thursday, March 13, TikTok.
In the TikTok video from user cruisegypsyuk@lillydapink, passengers are told via the loudspeaker announcement that the area they were passing through, the Sulu-Celebes Sea, from Darwin, Australia, to Manila in the Philippines, is “known for piracy threats.”
As a result, the cruise would be “operating at a heightened level of security alertness during this period,” which included the external promenade deck being closed overnight and “deck lights will be on to reduce the ship’s external lighting.”
The announcement also requested that passengers “turn off your stateroom lights when not needed, and close the curtains of your stateroom window or balcony.”
“As part of standard maritime procedures, our Captains may make precautionary announcements when sailing through certain regions,” the representative for Cunard cruise line told Business Insider. “There was no specific threat to the ship or its guests, and our onboard experience remained uninterrupted.”
The announcement then continued by delivering instructions in the event of a piracy-related emergency, emphasizing that the passengers and crew’s safety is the ship’s highest priority. “I assure you that measures to prevent any unlikely incident have been well planned and the likelihood of this happening on a big ship like Queen Anne is absolutely minimal.”
Several other TikTok users commented that they would be scared in the scenario. “Well that sounds terrifying 😂,” one user wrote. But the original poster replied, “Not really it’s just safety precautions the risk is very low 🥰👍.”
The TikTok user shared additional videos documenting the ship’s safety precautions as they navigated the Sulu-Celebes Sea, including videos of the dark rooms with the curtains drawn.
“So all the blinds were shut, and the lights were down to the minimum last night. The security did an amazing job keeping watch over the ship last night. Well done guys,” the user wrote in a separate TikTok.
The waters between Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines were once infamous for kidnapping-for-ransom incidents. Notably, the jihadist militant and pirate group, the Abu Sayyaf Group, was known for the incidents, per MarineInsight.
Between late 2016 and mid-2022, ships were advised to avoid the waters because abduction threats were high. There have been no abductions since January 2020, and as a result, the threat level moved down to “low” in January 2025, per MarineInsight.
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The TikToker is on a 111-night round-trip Maiden World Voyage, per Cruise Mapper. The cruise began in Hamburg, Germany, on Jan. 7 and has made stops in England, New York, Hawaii, Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, China and more.
The ship will return to Hamburg on April 29, after stopping in Vietnam, South Africa, Singapore, and Malaysia.
The Queen Anne accommodates 2,996 guests, 1,225 crew members and is 1,058 ft long.
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