Covid in paradise
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2021
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How are small island tourist destinations like the Caribbean island state of Antigua and Barbuda coping with the shutdown of global travel?
Manuela Saragosa speaks to the Antiguan Minister of Tourism Charles Fernandez about the innovative steps his country took to continue welcoming holidaymakers from North America and Europe last year, while keeping them safely contained within their own beachside bubbles.
The pandemic has been devastating for the travel industry more generally, according to Helen McDermott of Oxford Economics. Among those hardest hit are aircrew. Former pilot Matthew Wilson tells how he ended up relocating halfway across the planet to become a gardener after his airline went into liquidation. Meanwhile Jeffrey Goh of the Star Alliance global grouping of major airlines says they urgently need world governments to agree the conditions under which restrictions on travel can finally be lifted.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Mother, child in face masks have fun on sea beach; Credit: Bicho_raro/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC with me, Manuel Saraara. |
| 0:06.7 | Coming up, pack your bags. You're going on a beach holiday. |
| 0:09.7 | Just don't speak or interact too much with any of the locals when you get there. |
| 0:13.4 | So we literally trained thousands of our people. |
| 0:17.2 | Taurus were operating in their own quote-unquote bubble because everybody they came in contact with |
| 0:23.7 | was trained how to react to them. We speak to Antigua and Barbuda's tourism minister about how |
| 0:29.9 | this Caribbean island nation has maintained at least some visitor arrivals amid the COVID pandemic. |
| 0:36.1 | But how quickly can the travel industry get back on its feet? |
| 0:39.7 | We don't have some form of international benchmark to work with to say that, okay, we're all at 70% vaccinated, |
| 0:47.6 | then we should be able to reopen our borders. That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:07.0 | Yeah, so I miss those early morning takeoffs where I used to take off along Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong and see the sun rising and all those sort of panoramas you get from 30,000, 40,000 feet. |
| 1:14.5 | Seeing Mount Fuji as you fly past from Tokyo or the Great Wall of China as you come flying into Beijing. |
| 1:20.2 | They were always great things. |
| 1:22.0 | Matthew Wilson there was a pilot for Cathay Dragon, a unit of the Cathay Pacific Airline. |
| 1:28.2 | He worked out of Hong Kong flying mainly into China and Southeast Asia. |
| 1:33.1 | For a few months after COVID hit in early 2020, he hoped he might be able to keep his job, |
| 1:38.4 | even though his fleet was grounded. |
| 1:40.8 | We spent the whole of last year just listening to hearsay, reading newspaper articles, |
| 1:46.4 | you know, talking to friends and colleagues every day trying to get information out of the airline, |
| 1:51.3 | the ups and downs of thinking things were getting better and things were about to open up in |
| 1:55.3 | the middle of last year to a point where more restrictions were then coming back in and then |
| 2:00.3 | Europe started shutting down |
... |
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