You call it punishment. I call it legitimate corporate regulation. And yes, they probably will just pass the cost of their own negligence off on to consumers, which is just further proof that you can’t trust billion dollar companies to just do the right thing out of the goodness of their “hearts”.
Perhaps if there was more competition and less monopoly it would be less necessary.
The rules of capitalism dictates that next to a profit margin, 3000 souls on every ship is irrelevant. But you can bet they’ll hire a CEO that will pay a little better attention to safety and reliability in the future.
And yes, cruisers will pay the price for that too. But at least they’ll be alive to pay it.