In the beginnings of COVID-19 pandemic outbreak public opinion has been con-centrated on the tragic events taking place at the cruise ships, where the new virus has spread substantially. It is not the first outbreak of the infectious disease at a cruise ship. The following article aims at presenting the relevant case law of the British courts that have considered carrier’s liability for passengers’ claims in relation to personal injury caused by the outbreak of gastrointestinal illnesses caused by the norovirus. Fur-thermore, the readers will be familiarized with the legal situation of injured passengers under the American law.

The goal of the article is the description and analyze of the exclusions of the maritime carrier’s liability, regulated in international conventions, known as the Hague-Visby Rules and the Hamburg Rules. Their construction is basically different and indicates, that their creators had quite the opposite approach in the way of regulation of the negative scope of maritime carrier’s liability.

In the article it has been compared each exclusion of liability in both conventions, especially with the consideration of the genuine differences with the carrier’s scope of liability. It has been analyzed the examples of the real cases, that have been ruled on the grounds of the maritime carrier’s liability. It has been also take a try to evaluate if the court’s sentence would be the same on the grounds of both conventions, or rather would be different.