Post-hurricane Caribbean update: What you need to know when planning your vacation

In just over five months since hurricanes Irma and Maria ravaged the northernmost Caribbean Islands, reconstruction has been unceasing, and travelers have begun returning.

I visited St. Croix in February, and the residents of this 84-square-mile land mass in the U.S. Virgin Islands are hanging out the welcome sign for visitors in a big way.

At first glance, there are few indications Maria devastated the lives of many St. Crucians and battered the tourism industry when it swept across the island on Sept. 20. The landscape is tidy, most roads are repaired and heavy post-hurricane rains have helped revive much of the island’s lushness. Power has been restored to most of the island, and the airport has been open since October.

Hurricane recovery has been paramount on St. Croix — tourism accounts for more than half its gross domestic product — as it does on the dozen or so other islands pummeled by the two tempests.

“There’s different stages of the rebuild and recover process,” said Hugh Riley, secretary-general of the Caribbean Tourism Organization, a 26-country agency to promote tourism across the region. “There were some [islands] that really took these two hurricanes on the chin, but they are all on the way back,”

Overall, the Caribbean experienced record-breaking tourism performance in 2017, surpassing the 30 million mark in stay-over arrivals and reaching $37 billion spent by visitors, according to the agency research director Ryan Skeete.

However, hurricane-impacted islands recorded decreases in tourist arrivals ranging from 7 percent to 18 percent, he said.

There are isolated reminders of the ferocious back-to-back storms on St. Croix: pulverized buildings, mangled fences, debris-filled trash bins, tangled power lines, damaged yachts. Bright blue tarps serve as temporary roofs on some structures. One of the island’s two solar farms is now a field of twisted metal.

Only those who knew St. Croix before the hurricanes would note the island’s new openness — resulting from the loss of dozens of stately mahogany trees and thick rain forest canopy.

“The landscape took a beating,” said Rosalie Toussaint-Lewis, manager of the 40-unit Tamarind Reef resort, which saw water damage to some rooms and the swimming pool buried in sand. “We had lots of coconut trees and flowers that are gone.”

Most tourism enterprises, like the Tamarind, are surviving, in part due to Federal Emergency Management Agency workers filling hotels and restaurants and using services. The Tamarind, which reopened two days after Hurricane Maria, is housing many relief workers but only a handful of leisure guests currently, Toussaint-Lewis said.

Psychologist Richard Ottenstein, chief executive of the Maryland-based Workplace Trauma Center, was on St. Croix in February at FEMA’s behest to provide support for government workers and first responders. On his day off, Ottenstein took a snorkeling trip to nearby Buck Island Reef National Monument and said he highly recommended St. Croix to visitors.

“There’s plenty to do, and there’s lots of nice restaurants open, so I would come here on vacation at this point,” Ottenstein said. “But people need to make sure they have solid reservations before they come, because housing and cars are very tight due to all the relief workers.”

One brand-new hotel in Frederiksted is taking in growing numbers of leisure guests each month, according to owners. Despite Hurricane Maria’s storm surge, which sent seawater, brush and coral through the historic property and into a hole that had been dug for a swimming pool, the 22-room hotel, The Fred, opened its doors Dec. 1, becoming the first new hotel on St. Croix in 30 years.

“The big challenge for us was not the hurricane, but the looting afterward,” co-owner Christopher Swanson said. “And it was like, OK, do we want to quit? Do we need to quit? But we didn’t entertain the idea for very long.”

Friends stateside sent chainsaws so piles of rubble could be cleared by Swanson and his partner, Jeff Printz. The hip boutique hotel, with bold contemporary décor in charming 18th-century buildings, has 12 rooms currently available, with the remaining 10 rooms, restaurant, pool and elevated sun deck scheduled to open in various stages starting in May.

“We weren’t expecting to be this busy at this point,” Swanson said. “We have a little phrase now; we say, ‘Damn, we’re better after Maria.’ ”