So, last year my wife went on a cruise that started and ended in San Juan. Turned out the she really liked Puerto Rico, so much so that in early August we booked airline reward tickets to the island for a vacation next April. No firm plans other than to rent a car and spend about three days at three different locations. We figured we could refine the plans about a month or so before the trip.
Of course, now it looks almost certain that we will cancel the trip, but I do wonder about how long it will take for tourism to recover. After Irma hit the island, the damage didn’t seem to be so severe to affect our plans. Maria changed that. With reports in the news that power may be out for months, certainly rebuilding homes and businesses will take at least that long, and even if tourism is a big industry I can’t imagine that it would be ready or even a priority in six months time.
Does anyone have any experience with tourism to places after a disaster? Like I said, we are almost certain to cancel but have not made a final decision.
From the news reports a long long time. They were broke before and the US has been slow to respond (how many senators do they have?)
In Sunday’s NY Times travel section they had a piece on Caribbean vacations and they included the fact that PR had largely escaped Irma and was up for tourism. Granted that this section was written days before, this was in the paper TWO days ago! Have they no editors?
But an article in the news section mentioned a farmer whose main crop was plantain. He said that all of his trees had been destroyed along with most other crops and it sounded like he was predicting a severe shortage of food. I don’t know how long plantain takes to start fruiting (it is not really a tree, but a large bush), but it seemed to me an important source of calories the one time I was in PR. Somewhere I read that bananas (which includes plantain) is the second largest (after rice) source of calories in the world.
As long as the airport is functioning, we will be visiting St Martin in January. Although things will be different, we are eager to visit with friends we’ve made over the years. The place we stay has their own generator and water, and they are happy to have us.
Instead of renting a car like we usually do, we are hiring friends and their relatives by the day to drive us places. We are setting this up via Facebook. This was my gf’s idea as a way to get cash to those who need it most.
I’d like to hear how that visit goes,** kayaker**. Unfortunately we don’t have any local contacts and would need to rely on tourist businesses. I’d like to support them especially if they need the business after Maria, but April is probably too soon for that.
The Florida Keys was badly hit by Irma, is heavily dependent on tourism–and they are re-opening for tourists on October 1.
I would expect the big resorts to be ready for tourists well before April: it the small places which will have problems.
While there will be distribution problems and shortages of food for the next few weeks, after than food will simply be imported into the country. Note over a third of the population gets Food Stamps:
Grand Cayman was hit by a Hurricane Ivan as a strong Category 4 storm (possibly Cat 5. The official wind gauge ripped off and blew away) on Sept 11, 2004. Cruise tourism resumed by mid November. Stay over tourism by January 1, 2005 for properties that were relatively lightly afflicted. The 2005-06 winter season was absolutely normal, though a couple hotels had been effectively destroyed by Ivan so overall room inventory was lower.
It took a bit more than two months to fully restore power to all neighborhoods, but hotels and major tourism infrastructure had power and running water within one month. We were lucky as the parent company of our power company already had a shipment of power poles and transformers enroute to their Belize subsidiary. They redirected that shipment to Cayman. Still, this year seems to have better availability of such supplies so I think PR will get what they need in a relatively timely manner.
Since tourism is a major contributor to the economy of PR it will be a priority. It is a way to get the economy jump started and get people back to work. Priorities for restoration of services include hospitals, supermarkets, gas stations, police stations, prisons, airports, sea ports, and whatever hotel or other lodging where the visiting extra electrical linemen are staying. Especially the linemen’s hotels!
I would expect that PR will be able to handle the cruise ships that visit there by late October, if not sooner. The ships that home port there may struggle with logistics a bit longer but will likely handle much of high season just fine. The port will be overwhelmed with incoming rebuilding supplies but at least PR can handle larger draft cargo vessels than Cayman could.
Katrina certainly whalloped and depopulated New Orleans (permanently in whole neighborhoods) but it was rebuilt reasonably well fairly quickly. As a major tourism center, the touristy areas were the first to be rebuilt and the infrastructure is arguably better now than it was pre-Katrina in places like the French Quarter.
Puerto Rico is a little different. Its infrastructure was terrible even before the storm and the island/commonwealth is broke like a Caribbean Chicago. What they are going through now is terrible but it could be a mixed blessing in the medium term. It is still part of the U.S. and we won’t let it fail. My best guess is that they are going to be getting a whole lot of free (to them) infrastructure out of it and that could be beneficial to their economy in the long-term.
The major focus now is on disaster relief but, once that is under control, engineers and and disaster experts can help them rebuild hopefully better than before. The biggest question is who is going to pay the bills. There are a huge amount of people from Texas to Florida that also need relief and it isn’t going to go over well if they aren’t treated equally. Your average Puerto Rican doesn’t have as much money as someone in Houston so you have to walk a careful line. You can’t just start giving out free houses because there isn’t enough money for that even though many people have lost everything.
