March 22nd, 2021

 Cruise Lines Fear Another Lost SummerJulie Bykowicz and Ted Mann | Photographs by Octavio Jones for The Wall Street Journal

PORT  CANAVERAL, Fla.—Terminal Three, a cavernous $155 million structure  built for Carnival Cruises, is decked out with the company’s signature  blue paint, hundreds of beechwood seats and a posh VIP room with table  lamps so new that sales tags still hang from some.

It sits empty,  near vast, vacant parking lots and fleets of idle shuttle buses.  Sparsely populated hotels and restaurants surround what was once the  world’s second-busiest cruising port. Waylaid port workers scrape by on a  mix of low-paying odd jobs and government help.

“I never thought  I would be standing in a food line for hours,” said James Cox, a  50-year-old porter, who used to earn $27 an hour wrangling passengers  and their luggage. “Just the degradation of it. You say to yourself,  ‘Wow, I am really at this point.’ ”

Like the rest of the maritime  tourism industry, Port Canaveral was mothballed at the start of the  coronavirus pandemic. One year on, as other parts of the economy blink  back to life, the U.S. cruise industry is waiting anxiously for  Washington’s go-ahead to sail again—and worried that a second summer  season is about to be lost.