Your cruise ship contract could be taking you for a ride. While most cruises are safe and pleasantly memorable ones, there are cases where passengers have suffered injuries and even death, such as the Costa Concordia shipwreck on January 13.

Many passengers on that boat ride are just now beginning to realize that there was a legal structure in place that shelters cruise operators from big-money lawsuits. The situation gets more complicated in remote jurisdictions. The Costa Concordia, a subsidiary of industry giant Carnival Corp., is located in Italy.

Many cruise ship passengers don’t receive their complex, multi-page ticket contract until just before boarding. The way the contracts are worded has been the subject of court battles for decades. For example, the Costa Concordia ticket contract said this: all claims, controversies, disputes, suits and matters of any kind whatsoever…shall be instituted only in the courts of Genoa, Italy.”

Victims are usually required to file suits in the country where the cruise ship company is headquartered. Indeed, many passengers on the Italy-based Costa Concordia are finding out how challenging the Italian court system can be.

For starters, lawyers in Italy usually don’t accept injury cases on a contingency basis as they do in the U.S. This means that for an injured person to sue, they must pay their lawyer upfront. The fact that the ship’s captain is under investigation for abandoning ship is a moot point – at least until the investigation is completed and the information has been made available to the Plaintiff’s lawyers. One lawyer was quoted in an article, saying that he had had cases that took seven years and weren’t nearly as complicated as the Costa Concordia situation.

The Costa Concordia’s contract terms are under investigation in Florida, home of Carnival Corp., by a few Plaintiffs’ lawyers. In one case, 39 survivors are seeking at least $528 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging negligence that was filed in a state court.

Over the years, Carnival and its competitors have changed their ticket contracts to make it tougher for passengers to file an injury claim or collect large settlements. They say it prevents frivolous lawsuits and lowers cruise costs for passengers. The legal clauses also make the cruise ship industry highly profitable.

The question of whether passengers must file a lawsuit has reached the Supreme Court. In 1991, the Court sided with Carnival, ruling that the clause about where to file a lawsuit helped to avoid confusion about where to sue if an accident happened on the open seas. The lawyer who represented the cruise line association in that case said that the so-called “forum clause” helped eliminate “wasteful” litigation.

And here’s something even more unbelievable. In cases where deaths have occurred by negligence on cruise ships, surviving families receive little compensation. In one case, a woman died of smoke inhalation. Her family received money only for funeral expenses. That was all they were entitled to under U.S. law.

Though the final cost of personal liability claims won’t be known for years in the Costa Concordia case, the ship’s owner is covered by insurance with a $10 million deductible.