After four days on a crippled cruise ship with overflowing toilets, stifling heat and hours-long waits for food, at least one passenger from the Carnival Triumph is seeking legal revenge.

But lawyers familiar with cruise ship lawsuits suggest angry passengers should think twice before rushing to the courts. Unless passengers suffered major injuries or other losses due to negligence by the cruise operator, they would be better off accepting compensation from Carnival Corp, they said.

The Carnival Triumph was towed into port in Mobile, Alabama, late on Thursday, giving disembarking passengers an opportunity to speak out about their ordeal.

Within hours, Cassie Terry, of Brazoria County, Texas, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Miami describing the ship as “a floating toilet, a floating Petri dish, a floating hell” and seeking damages from Carnival Corp.

As the ship listed as it was being towed, Terry was in constant fear of contracting serious illness from raw sewage spilling from non-functioning toilets. She had to wade through human feces to reach food lines that were hours long, only to receive spoiled rations, according to the lawsuit.

But Terry’s account and those of other passengers do not describe the type of injuries or harm that could lead to a successful lawsuit, according to attorneys who specialize in suing cruise companies.

Conditions might have been disgusting “but get over it,” said Miriam Lebental, an attorney from San Pedro, California, who specializes in cruise ship injuries.

Like other attorneys that pursue cruise companies, she said she would not be interested in taking a case unless it involved a major injury and negligence, such as a passenger breaking their neck during a fall down an unlit stairwell.

There have been no such reports from the Triumph.

Terry declined to comment. Her attorney, Brenton Allison of Gilman & Allison in Pearland, Texas, said he understood that other attorney’s were skeptical about taking cases from passengers, but his client was nauseated and running a fever.

“I don’t know what may manifest from her exposure to those conditions,” he said, adding that Terry would decline the compensation offered.

Carnival has offered passengers $500, reimbursed their transportation and many onboard costs and given them a credit toward a future cruise equal to the amount they paid for the Triumph vacation.

Jim Walker, a premier lawyer for cruise passengers, said passengers would be wise to take the money.

“It’s more than any attorney could get for them,” said Walker, a partner at Walker & O’Neill in South Miami, Florida.

The cruise industry has become adept at using tickets, which are binding contracts, to limit their liability and define how a passenger can sue the cruise company, the lawyers said.

These tickets are “the most onerous one-sided terms and conditions,” said Walker. “It’s difficult to sue them.”

For example, the tickets for the Costa Concordia, which hit rocks off the coast of Italy in January 2012 and killed 32, required passengers to sue in Italy.

Several cases brought in Miami federal court by Concordia passengers were dismissed for that reason.

In the case of the Triumph, the tickets likely contain similar language that require that lawsuits be brought in federal court in Miami, regardless of where the passenger lives.

The cruise industry has said that such “forum selection” clauses in cruise tickets help keep down costs for cruise operators by corralling all litigation in one court.

Walker said it gives the cruise industry leverage.

“It’s like built-in home court advantage for the Miami Heat,” he added.

Carnival, which is the parent company to both the Triumph and the Concordia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Cruise companies have also been able to limit their liability for accidents that occur during shore excursions or for the negligence of ship staff.

That is because the cruise companies use outside companies to handle activities such as parasailing, even when the staff leading the excursions wear shirts or hats bearing the insignia of the cruise company.

Cruise tickets often state that harm caused during excursions must be brought against the company that provided the activity.

Many staff doctors or masseuses are independent contractors and passengers must sue them, not the cruise line, and staff often do not have insurance and frequently are not Americans.

“If the ship doctor kills you, your family has to chase the doctor in South Africa or the Middle East or India, which is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible,” Walker added.

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More than 4,200 people trapped aboard the crippled cruise ship Carnival Triumph, having endured days of overflowing toilets, should return to land when tugboats haul the vessel into Mobile, Alabama late on Thursday.

The 893-foot (272 meter) vessel, notorious for reports of raw sewage from overflowing toilets, has been without propulsion and running on emergency generator power since Sunday, when an engine room fire left it adrift in the Gulf of Mexico.

Operated by Carnival Cruise Lines, the flagship brand of global cruise ship giant Carnival Corp, the ship left Galveston, Texas a week ago carrying 3,143 passengers and 1,086 crew. It was supposed to return there on Monday.

Carnival Corp spokesman Vance Gulliksen in Miami said the Triumph was expected to arrive in Mobile at between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. CST on Thursday night (9.00 p.m. ET Thursday and 12.00 a.m. GMT on Friday).

“This is going to be a long day,” Terry Thornton, a senior Carnival Cruise Lines vice president, told reporters at the port in Mobile.

He said the ship, which he described as “in excellent shape” after additional provisions were laid in on Wednesday, was near the sea buoy at the entrance to Mobile Bay late on Thursday morning. Getting from the buoy into port normally takes about three hours, Thornton said.

“There is no way we could actually speed up the process to get the ship alongside sooner,” he said. “We’re making every effort we can to get the ship alongside here in Mobile as quickly as possible.”

A Coast Guard cutter has been escorting the Triumph on its long voyage into port since Monday, and a Coast Guard helicopter ferried about 3,000 pounds (1,360 kg) of equipment including a generator to the stricken ship late on Wednesday.

Earlier in the week, some passengers reported on the poor conditions on the Triumph when they contacted relatives and media before their cellphone batteries died.

They said people were getting sick and passengers had been told to use plastic “biohazard” bags as makeshift toilets.

MORE COMPENSATION

Carnival Cruise Lines President and Chief Executive Gerry Cahill said in a statement late on Wednesday that the company had decided to add further payment of $500 per person to help compensate passengers for “very challenging circumstances” aboard the ship.

“We are very sorry for what our guests have had to endure,” Cahill said.

Mary Poret, who spoke to her 12-year-old daughter aboard the Triumph on Monday, rejected Cahill’s apology out of hand in comments to CNN on Thursday, as she waited anxiously in Mobile with a friend for the Triumph’s arrival.

“Seeing urine and feces sloshing in the halls, sleeping on the floor, nothing to eat, people fighting over food, $500? What’s the emotional cost? You can’t put money on that,” Poret said.

The troubles on the Carnival Triumph occurred a little more than a year after 32 people were killed when the Costa Concordia, a luxury cruise ship operated by Carnival Corp’s Costa Cruises brand, was grounded on rocks off the Tuscan island of Giglio in Italy.

Carnival Corp Chairman and CEO Micky Arison faced criticism in January last year for failing to travel to Italy and take personal charge of the Costa Concordia crisis, which unleashed numerous lawsuits against his company.

The cruise ship mogul has taken a low-key approach to the Triumph situation as well, even as it grabbed a growing share of the U.S. media spotlight. His only known public appearance since Sunday was courtside on Tuesday at a game played by his championship Miami Heat basketball team.

Carnival Corp shares were down $0.12 at $37.34 in early afternoon trading on Thursday on the New York Stock Exchange. The shares closed down 4 percent at $37.46 on Wednesday after the company said voyage disruptions and repair costs related to Carnival Triumph could shave up to 10 cents per share off its second-half earnings.

Carnival said it had initially planned to tow the Triumph into Progreso in Mexico, the closest port to its location early on Sunday when the engine room fire occurred. But the ship drifted about 90 nautical miles north, due to strong currents, before the towing got under way, and that left it stranded roughly midway between Progreso and Mobile.

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