Gay Nagle Myers
It was one helluva year, but we have finally said farewell and good riddance to 2020, a year that took its toll on millions of individuals, families and industries in hundreds of countries.
The pandemic continues to slam all of us across the board and borders: exhausted healthcare workers; struggling business and restaurant owners; travel advisors who are juggling cancellations and ever-changing entry regulations; housekeeping staff furloughed with no hotel rooms to clean; and beach vendors with no wares to sell or tourists to buy their coconut bowls and hand-woven straw hats.
One of my memories of the terrible 2020 is personal and probably very selfish, also very minor compared to the real suffering and losses of so many others. A trip to the Caribbean was finally in the offing late in October but I was told that where I live (Virginia) was a high-risk state and that I was a high-risk traveler and therefore not welcome on that island at that time.
Gay Nagle Myers
The election of Biden as president has inspired a lot of post-Covid travel dreams about Cuba, particularly among advisors and tour operators who specialize in travel to the island.
What will president-elect Joe Biden do about Cuba after he s sworn in on Jan. 20? What are the possibilities for U.S.-Cuba travel? That was the question posed to an impressive group of Cuba experts during a recent Zoom webinar regarding the possibility that the Biden administration would relax travel restrictions to Cuba.
The webinar date, not coincidentally, marked the sixth anniversary of the announcement on Dec. 17, 2014, by presidents Obama and Fidel Castro to normalize diplomatic relations.
Gay Nagle Myers
Covid s impact this year on the business of tourism came up during my recent conversation with Adam Stewart, deputy chairman of Sandals Resorts International, on the launch of the Sandals brand on Curacao.
He was bullish but conservative on the outlook for tourism recovery in the year ahead. 2021 will be a much better year, he said. It won t be a boom year, but it will be an exciting one with great potential. Repeat travelers and new travelers will begin to venture forth, especially once the vaccines are available and people feel more confident about traveling, he said.
Gay Nagle Myers
Adam Stewart, deputy chairman of Sandals Resorts International, was dining on tuna caught just an hour earlier when he called from a restaurant overlooking a marina on a certain Caribbean island.
He was excited. We re on a new island, he said. A magnificent island. We will open a Sandals resort here. It s the first island outside the British Caribbean for us.
Due to the pandemic and closed borders, the Santa Barbara s owner suspended all operations at the property in June. We d had our eyes on this destination for several years, Stewart said. From the moment we saw the site and the hotel, we loved it. The property sits on 3,000 acres in the Santa Barbara Estate along Spanish Water, a natural lagoon and bay, a 20-minute drive from the capital of Willemstad on Curacao s southern coast.