While we see the images of parked airliners lined up on taxiways and wing-to-wing at various airports around the world, where are all the cruise ships?

Living across from the Port of Miami, months after the pause on cruising, ships continue to sail in and out on a daily basis. That sort of makes sense. One might guess they need to refuel and get more provisions. But clearly, unlike airliners, the over 300 cruise ships that are out there, arent just static, shutdown, mothballed, and tied up somewhere.

Despite the pause on cruising, ships are on the move. Where are they going? Who's on board? Why not ... [+] just park them like airliners?

Looking at Cruisemapper.com heightened my intrigue. While its apparent some of these vacation wonderlands anchor offshore for periods of time (below), they also seem to be on the move, in some cases on long voyages (above).

Cruise ships anchored near Great Habour Cay in the Bahamas.

To find out whats going on, I reached out to the three biggest operators of cruise ships.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings operates the Oceania and Regent Seven Seas brands in addition to its namesake. They responded first and politely declined to offer answers to my questions about what was going on just beyond the horizon.

Royal Caribbean Group, which counts Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Silversea, Azamara, TUI, and Hapag-Lloyd in its portfolio was next up, and gave me a glimpse into whats going on.

A spokesperson told me that ships come in an out of port for fuel and provisions. He noted that due to restrictions on repatriating crew, ports acted as hubs where members transferred from one ship to another, not necessarily to disembark.

Since onboard staff come from a multitude of countries, and it was often impossible to get them home via scheduled airline flights, Royal Caribbean chartered full airliners to fly them there.

While he declining to talk specifics, an example as I understood it might be Indonesian and Philippine passports holders on several were ships transited to a single vessel while making a port stop. That vessel then sailed to a country that had given Royal Caribbean permission to transfer the crew to charter flights that would fly them to their home nations.

Describing the repatriation as monumental, the entire operation wasnt completed until the end of June. Ships that when sailing had over 8,000 passengers and crew now are staffed by around 100 team members.

He also pointed out that there isnt enough space in ports to dock all its ships, hence the cluster of ships anchored offshore.

Carnival Corporation was last to get back to me, but presented the most comprehensive picture of whats taking place out at sea.

A spokesperson noted none of the companys now 90 ships, down from 105 before the pause - 15 are leaving the fleet - are currently in U.S. waters.

The industrys largest player, its brands include Carnival, Princess, Holland America, Cunard, Seabourn, Aida, Costa, and P&O.

The Carnival Corp. representative said it utilized 49 ships that traveled over 400,000 nautical miles around the world, along with chartered aircraft, to repatriate over 80,000 crew members. So in other words, some of those long voyages I was seeing on Cruisemapper.com were a result of sailing onboard teams back to their home countries.

The lockdown circumstances, restrictions, closures, various rules around the world and reductions in commercial air made it difficult to use normal means to repatriate crew members from over 130 countries, he said.

Challenges not only included sailing or flying crew home. Back in May, Bill Burke, the companys chief maritime officer told Cruise Business issues with test results and certification delayed for weeks repatriation thousands of Filipino employees. He noted some crew live in countries where borders were closed to both maritime and air arrivals.

Now that repatriations are done, why not just mothball the ships?

It turns out the remaining ships are in what Carnival calls a warm layup, positioned around the world, including the Caribbean, Europe, Asia and in the eastern Pacific.

Warm layup is where most of the ships major systems continue to operate to make sure they function normally over time and the ship can quickly be put back into service.

A cold layup shuts down most of the ships systems for a longer-term period of inactivity for the ship, by the way.

According to Carnival, the ships in warm layup are staffed with crew members at what is called safe-manning levels, which for larger ships is an average of about 100 crew members including deck officers navigating the ship, engineers in charge of propulsion and power, a security team, and hotel and kitchen staff, along with medical professionals for any crew needs.

There are approximately 12,000 crew members remain on Carnival Corp. ships for safe-manning duties.

Whats life like on these ghost ships?

The Carnival rep said most crew members are staying alone, per protocol for disease mitigation, and in guest cabins with a window or balcony. They have access to outdoor spaces, movies, Internet, and are able to stay in touch with family and friends.

If you want a closer look, several crew still aboard the ships are posting vlogs on Youtube.

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Where Are All The Cruise Ships? - Forbes