In the Caribbean, NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO WALK OUTSIDE TO GET INTO A PLANE!

TRAVEL IN THE CARIBBEAN IS TORTURE!

By Professor Gilbert Morris

The beauty of the Caribbean is a distortion field. There are few places in the world where nature displays her moving panoply as agreeably as the CARIBBEAN.

Mottled green and iridescent blue waters, swirling into creamy dreamscape freckled with evergreen pastoral nodes: islands, cays, islets…are an immediate thrill to the senses.

However, when travelling within and across the Caribbean, this tapestry of loveliness aforementioned, gives way first to stupidity, then cruelty, then demotic idiocies.

In fact and effect, travelling within and across the Caribbean reveals our self-abnegation: our careless disregard for each other, in the exhibition of which, it seems, there is no inconvenience or unconscionable stupidity we won’t impose on each other because of our utter lack of process intelligence.

Process intelligence is the knowledge of logistics, people movement and processing, to prevent triage or cascades; essentially the [sic] of a logistics process.

Countries with population, weather, elevation (mountains), languages (4-5 minimum) and currency…have little choice but to develop process intelligence. So Singapore and Hong Kong are small spaces with relatively large populations. Yet they can move 100,000 people through a process in 7 minutes. Jamaica, India and Brazil have large populations relatively speaking…in large spaces and yet are horrendous as processing people.

100,000 people may take two days. (Though, I confess, Jamaica learned something after its devastatingly barbarous start to airport throughput management during the first 5 months of COVID 19).

We encounter our own indulgence in cruelty in the manner in which we designed our cut n’ paste airports largely for planeing and deplaneing flights. Tourists come for the Sun, yet their flights are parked conveniently, 30 seconds from the arrival halls. But locals - more likely to be professionals, dressed for business - must walk 1000 meters in the blistering Sun, to enter an unfumigated, often frowsy, hot plane and sit as operators go casually about their inefficient paper-laden process; asking each other questions in bewilderment about things they do as routine every day…as they themselves sweat like feral Goats!

I flew from Jamaica to Providenciales, to Nassau. This was the “valley of the shadow of death”. Listen: there was not one single element or option or pretence of convenience in the entire trip. Rain or shine, you walk outside like herded Yaks. Some airports still retain the idiotic, absolutely useless processes which they copycatted after 911; such as removing one’s shoes and separating one’s laptops. We understand the regulations for entering America…that’s a different issue. But to impose these waste-of-time procedures (NO ONE UNDERSTANDS) for inter-island travel in the region is demonstrably ridiculous. No country in this region has the analytics to assess a laptop or shoes or a tub of Shea-butter!

One could understand if we eliminated the other logistical inconveniences and kept the ones we copied slavishly from America. But keeping both without regard to the suffering imposed on our own people travelling is demotic.

Once you’ve walked 1000 meters in the Sun, sweating like a mountain goat, and entered the barbecue pit which is the plane, the flights are quite comfy and the staff are sweet and lovely…not to mention to [sic] views out the window. But in my case…cause God mistook me for Job…sat next to me was a sweet lady. She had a TELEVISION…an entire flatscreen television…covering the window at our seat. She had one bag under the seat which appeared large enough to have three dead people in it. And another bag in her lap with enough bottles of lotion to moisturise all of Trinidad. When I sat…she said in the greatest understatement since Jesus shocked the Pharisees: “it’s kinda jam up”. “Indubitably” was my quite reply.

Once one lands in Providenciales…you walk back to Jamaica…that how long is the walk to the transit lounge.

WAIT! What am I talking about…THERE IS NO TRANSIT LOUNGE!

There is an accidental hallway, with a luggage scanner jammed into it like scaffolding in an elevator…and passengers - in the most cruel and unconscionable process of my entire trip - must stand outside on the tarmac, in the Sun…and wait for the door to the pit of hell to be opened. Old people, women with little children…all must stand there as if waiting outside a one toilet outhouse.

It is wrong and must be changed immediately…it is below TCI to allow such a thing.

Additionally, this process is utterly brainless. You leave Jamaica or Dominican Republic, you’ve passed through security with all the useless, idiotic processes…you deplane for transit and must have your handhelds scanned again, for what: the Bazooka you bought in duty free?

Once you make it into the departure lounge - your spleen and patience stretched to the limit - there aren’t enough seats, the air is stale, everything costs $11 dollars…and they’ve rented out every corner of the departure lounge like a ghetto fairground for retail tourist trap shops!

Then…you are marched out to walk in the Sun…the 40 years in the wilderness to find the land of Canaan, to get to the plane.

Again, the flight is pleasant the staff are sweet and lovely and the views are divine…except for the mattress sized TV in my case!

One lands at Nassau and the torture begins anew: mainly you must walk to Gethsemane, across the isles of Patmos, down Berma Road to get to immigration. I denounce this as idiocy, cruelty and stupidity. Why should you suffer thus in your own country with a design so clueless about human comfort?

Whether is supposed to spur innovation. Denmark has bad weather, as does Finland, Sweden, Switzerland so that motivated them toward innovation as a means of cultivating comfort. We seem to just copy form anywhere (mostly Fort Lauderdale for Jesus sake), and force ourselves into their designs, which anticipates NOTHING about our actual lives.

In the Caribbean, NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO WALK OUTSIDE TO GET INTO A PLANE!

If cooling the plane and gangways is expensive…why isn’t that our first innovation with solar power to ensure comfort and convenience in planeing and deplaneling?

In principle, the hotter it is outside, the cooler the gangway and the plane would be, without adding to energy costs!

It’s specific, measurable, small scale and if it works, everyone would copy us….AND I LIKE THAT!

During COVID I travelled to Dubai. Upon landing, there must have been 20-30,000 people from the various arrivals.

In minutes the airport lines were gone!

Why?

Cause dey fast?

Their hands don’t move any faster than ours.

No! They did something before they built the airport: they committed to eliminating lines as part of an ambition to build a spectacular airport in which the first consideration was HUMAN COMFORT!

How can we claim to be hospitality destinations when domestic and inter-Caribbean travel is wretched, stupid, cruel and demotic?

“Charity begins…”, y’all been to Sunday school….!

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IN A DEFAULT TO ZERO SUM OUTCOMES, THE CARIBBEAN WILL LOSE!

Meanwhile, unfashionable seaside resorts within driving distance of urban centres may make a surprise comeback in popularity.

Atlantic City, near New York and Philadelphia, and Margate, east of London, may once again outshine the foreign, sunnier beaches that long ago eclipsed them.

The staycation trend may fuel the growth of economies already doing relatively well after covid-19, while setting back those doing badly.

By Gilbert Morris

The decline in international travel is hardening (See graphs below). Understanding this is critical to the right conceptualisation of what’s actually happening. I warned that our plantation economic model premised on a “double wait”

a. For foreign investors

b. For American tourists

Then feverishly dividing the meagre scarps by political tribalism, is not an economic model.

All the 258 pandemics recorded in history have not only shifted entire economic and social paradigms, they also reveal and punish system and structural fragilities, above and beyond the excuse-making voices of politicians, used to gaslighting their populations.

It was only a few weeks ago, public officials were exclaiming that “booking were up”. But we knew that if we had no protocols on the ground equal to the best practices of the best performing countries in Covid 19, point to booking was a mere demented distraction from reality.

Now underlying structural shifts are taking place, the success and strengths of which will be directly proportional to our economic prospects, and opposite to our lazy presumption that US tourists will soon return; an astonishing precept for an island state economy.

Read about the shifts - forecasted 13 months ago here - in a recent article from the Economist:

From The Economist!

The trend towards domestic holidays will create economic winners and losers:

A.J.P. TAYLOR, a British 20th-century historian, once wistfully noted that the only agents of state a Victorian Briton was likely to meet were the postman and the local policeman. How times have changed.

The pandemic has brought with it sweeping restrictions on what the state allows individuals to do. One of the latest is that, from March 29th, modern-day Britons will be fined £5,000 ($6,900) if they go abroad without reasonable excuse—a rule that in effect makes a foreign holiday a criminal offence.

No wonder that this year’s big vacation trend is the “staycation”—to go on holiday in one’s own country. That will have an uneven economic impact around the world.

Britain is not the only country to impose draconian restrictions on cross-border travel. America still bans virtually all Europeans from entering the country. Quarantine rules also have a chilling effect on leisure travellers.

Hong Kong’s system—among the harshest in the world—locks inbound passengers in hotels for 21 days to try and stop holidaymakers importing new variants of the disease.

Such measures, understandably, put a squeeze on leisure travel. Those with just two or three weeks’ paid leave a year have better things to do with their time than wait around in a quarantine hotel.

At the start of the pandemic, both foreign and domestic travel were destroyed by border closures and travel restrictions. So low was demand during the first lockdown that Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by some reckonings, almost shut down completely.

Even so, since last spring domestic travel has been steadily recovering, particularly in America, where lockdown rules have been loosened faster than elsewhere. According to OAG, a data firm, capacity on American domestic flights at the end of March—measured by the number of seats on all aircraft—was 23% below where it was in January of last year; in Australia it was down by 19%.

Meanwhile, cross-border travel remains in the doldrums. In China, where domestic-passenger traffic has fully recovered, international travel is 93% below where it was before the pandemic (see chart).

With a third wave of covid-19 cases sweeping through continental Europe, Latin America and India, the trend this summer could well be towards more border restrictions, not fewer.

The trend for more holidays nearer home will affect tourist spots in different ways. Islands are likely to suffer in favour of places that can be reached by car.

Insular paradises such as Cozumel in Mexico, which used to earn 70% of its GDP from passing cruise ships, and the Bahamas, which formerly generated a similar share of its income from tourism, will take a long time to recover.

Meanwhile, unfashionable seaside resorts within driving distance of urban centres may make a surprise comeback in popularity. Atlantic City, near New York and Philadelphia, and Margate, east of London, may once again outshine the foreign, sunnier beaches that long ago eclipsed them.

The staycation trend may fuel the growth of economies already doing relatively well after covid-19, while setting back those doing badly.

This was the conclusion of a recent report by Bernstein, a research firm, which estimated the economic impact of 60% of outbound tourism spending being used at home instead. Their result: China, whose economy is already larger than before the pandemic began, would be the biggest winner. And the biggest losers? Greece, Iceland and Portugal, whose economies have already suffered dreadfully over the past year.

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