The two weeks when Covid brought the planet to a standstill – CNN
March 6, 2022
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(CNN) Borders closing, travelers stranded, and small businesses haemorrhaging money -- that's how those in the travel industry will remember the period two years ago, when the world closed down in a matter of days.
On March 11, 2020, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Authority, and countries around the world were beginning to figure out emergency border policies in a bid to protect their citizens.
In travel, that meant vacationers scrambling to get home, and communities torn between needing visitors, and fearing what they might bring.
The two weeks around March 11 dealt a blow to the travel world, the likes of which had never been seen before. It's one that many small businesses and employees have yet to recover from.
Here nine travel experts share their memories of March 2020 -- from the tour guide stranded in Italy, to the hotelier in Dominica, who was forced to close the hotel she'd just reopened after hurricane devastation.
The hotelier
Avril Coipel: "It was like something you read in novels."
Avril Coipel
The award-winning eco resort bad been destroyed in 2017 by Hurricane Maria. With virtually all the staff drawn from the surrounding area, it was a tragedy for the local communities, as well as for the hotel.
A grand reopening had been planned for February 2020, and things were looking good -- the hotel's great reputation meant the bookings were rolling in. More importantly, says Coipel, "the local communities were looking forward to the opening of the resort -- we hired staff who hadn't been able to get a steady job since 2017."
In December, just weeks from their reopening ceremony, she saw the news about a virus taking hold in China. "It sounded far away," she says. "When it reached Italy it still sounded far away. When we started hearing it was in the US, we said, OK, that's a little close -- and then suddenly it was in the Caribbean."
The pandemic would have devastating consequences for Coipel and her coworkers. On February 15, they'd had a grand reopening ceremony, attended by government ministers, while bookings stacked up. It looked like 2020 would be as successful as the good old days had been.
But soon after their opening, they were watching covid outbreaks on cruise ships in the news. By early March, the cancellations were rolling in as they watched footage of empty streets in Europe -- "it was like something you read about in novels," says Coipel.
"By the time it reached mid March, we'd had all our bookings canceled, all the way down to December," she says. "By the time we closed, we didn't have any guests. All the cards fell down."
The Rosalie Bay Eco Hotel, Dominica
Ambo Visuals
Rosalie Bay closed on March 23, as Dominica went into lockdown just after. Coipel had to lay off nearly all her staff, slashing a team of 51 to a skeleton crew of just four to handle cancellations, plus security and landscaping to stop the forest taking over the resort.
It was devastating for the local community, as well as for Coipel personally.
"We were full of hope, full of promise, looking forward to the future," she says.
"It was a very sad time -- you close, stay closed for two years, finally get in a position to reopen -- and six weeks later you have to shut down again. Our staff is 95% local, the resort is locally owned -- it has a high impact on the surrounding communities."
As for Coipel herself, she found it "extremely depressing."
"When you're very confident in what you're doing and finally find yourself in a position where you don't know what's going on, you don't like it," she says.
"But the pandemic was new, bigger countries were really struggling -- we didn't know if the same thing would happen to us in Dominica. As a small island, there was concern that our health infrastructure would be overwhelmed.
"We had to deal not just with the reality of closing the resort and laying off staff, but also rising panic."
She kept in close contact with other hotels on the island -- they advised each other, and "gave each other that mental encouragement that all of us needed."
Things would get better. The hotel reopened in July 2020 for domestic travel, and a month later for international visitors. The staff are back.
"2021 started looking up, and we think 2022 will be better," says Coipel.
The flight attendant
Dana Schaefer was told by her coworkers to 'have a gameplan.'
Dana Schaefer
It was mid-March 2020 when, taking stock while in North Carolina between flights, Dana Schaefer noticed her world had changed.
"I remember going through Charlotte airport and it was like a scary movie," says the flight attendant.
"It was just so empty, everything was closed -- it was just flight crews walking through, no passengers."
Based out of Miami, Schaefer was working for a major airline -- which, by that point, was telling crew to bring their own food with them on trips.
"Even on layovers people were getting stuck because we were flying with no passengers, and once restaurants and even hotel restaurants started closing, we didn't want to be without food," she says.
By then, Covid-19 had already been declared a pandemic. As someone mainly flying within the US, Schaefer says the realization of what was happening was "pretty gradual, and then, boom -- flights were canceled and there were no people in the airports."
As a relative newbie -- Schaefer had started flying in 2018 -- she was unsure what to expect, but her more experienced coworkers could see the writing on the wall, comparing it to the aftermath of 9/11 -- and saying this was worse.
"They were trying to make sure I had a gameplan, and wasn't thinking, it's no big deal," she says. In October 2020, she would be furloughed for eight months.
Schaefer remembers those days around March 11 as "very scary." Suddenly her catering trolley was laden with masks and gloves.
"Once people found out how contagious it was, I was scared to continue flying and risk exposing my family," she says.
"It was a big mystery [how it spread] and I remember being scared to touch anything on the plane. It felt like a waiting game -- even if I do my best to be protected, am I going to get it?"
It was her sociable personality that had encouraged Schaefer to be a flight attendant -- formerly in customer service, she made the leap because "you get to talk to so many different people and I love that." But all that swiftly changed. "My job went from being hands on to you really don't do anything," she says.
"It was honestly kind of depressing. We were just walking through and picking up trash, not really interacting with anyone. And then you'd get to your layover and weren't allowed to go out or do anything."
Now she's back in the air in what she calls "weird times," where passenger aggression is at an all time high. "I just hope it gets back to normal," she says.
The tour guide
Francesca made it back to her beloved Rome (pictured) in 2022.
Courtesy Francesca Folmi
By the time they started, Italy was the global center of the pandemic. Just 14 people turned up.
"I started the welcome meeting saying, 'OK, let's get the c-word out of the way, let's let out all our fears and frustrations, then that'll be it and we can put it behind us,'" she says.
"It's unbelievable now but I really thought it was going to be OK. There weren't restrictions locally, no suppliers had pulled out, the itinerary was due to go ahead."
That night, walking to dinner, the group was confronted by a woman wearing a mask, shouting at them to spread out from each other.
"You could see the panic on her face -- she was the first person in Italy on whom I saw the fear of the virus," says Folmi, from Guernsey, UK.
The next morning, they drove south for a tour of Pompeii, continuing to Naples. "Things were going at warp speed," says Folmi -- while there'd been no restrictions in Rome, by the time they arrived in Naples the hotel was asking them to stay six feet apart and to avoid common areas.
They were booked for dinner with entertainment; they got dinner. Not that it mattered.
"By the end they were getting on famously, they were super excited on the coach home," says Folmi.
"I put music on, and was thinking, finally, they're going to relax a bit more.
"And then my phone pinged with a news alert: Italy was going into lockdown, effective immediately.
"They were still singing Miley Cyrus."
As they got to the hotel, Folmi informed her group that the tour was over and she was going to help them get home. By the next morning, Contiki had offered all participants a refund, plus promised a discount for future trips.
"It felt awful," says Folmi. "They'd made these massive journeys -- Australia, Canada, America -- and I was going to send them home 48 hours into their trip."
Train travel was already restricted, but their coach was able to take them back to Rome. There, Folmi coordinated her charges' flights home from a hotel paid for by Contiki. International flights were being canceled across the board, and while most guests got out within 24 hours, one Australian woman had to wait five days. By then, Folmi's own flight had been canceled three times. They eventually left together.
Back in Guernsey, Folmi had to quarantine for two weeks as Italy was classed as a "hot zone." Then, "work evaporated." She finally made it back to guiding in January 2022.
"It made my heart swell," she says about her return to Pompeii. "I felt, yeah, we're back."
The airline executive
Marty St. George: "We started thinking, huh, something's going on."
Marty St. George
Every Thursday, he would fly from Oslo to London to work with the UK team, and on March 11, he took his flight as usual.
"I just had an overnight bag -- I'd left every bit of clothing, my computer, books, everything in my apartment in Oslo," he says.
That night, as the WHO declared a pandemic, then-President Donald Trump closed the US borders to arrivals from Europe. St. George's daughter called him in the middle of the night to tell him to come home -- so on March 12, instead of returning to Oslo, he flew from London to Boston.
"I went to dinner -- the restaurant was empty. Friday morning I flew to New York, thinking I should stop at the grocery store. I walked into Whole Foods to find the shelves empty, people yelling. I'd only left five days earlier and the place had collapsed."
"We started thinking, huh, something's going on, but we weren't sure what the cause was," he says.
"I remember hearing about it in China in January, and dismissing it. We didn't know what would happen in Europe.
"I thought it'd be a month and we'd get over it. I went through demand bumps in both Gulf Wars, after 9/11 and after the recession. I predicted another bump, not a tsunami."
Lunch with a friend from Hong Kong in February made him think differently. And by the last week of February, he says, "We knew something bad was happening" in aviation.
Airlines tend to use advance bookings as working capital -- in other words, to buy fuel. Without new bookings coming in but flights still running, the airlines were "bleeding cash," he says.
On March 8, much of northern Italy was placed into lockdown. Norwegian flew to Milan "so we had problems right off the bat," he says.
As for his own situation, when he rushed back to the US, he assumed he'd be back in Oslo soon. "At that point we all thought if we isolated for four weeks, it'd go away," he says.
Of course, it didn't. Finally, fed up of paying rent on an apartment he wasn't using, St. George asked his coworkers in Oslo to pack up his belongings and ship them to him in the US. He received them in May.
The B&B owner
Veronica Grechi finally opened her new rooms in 2021.
Velona's Jungle
Veronica Grechi's dream had always been to share her native Florence with visitors.
It did well -- so well, in fact, that in 2019 they bought the apartment below, and planned to open six new rooms. 2020 was going to be Grechi's year -- not only was she expanding the B&B, but she was having her first child in March. Also, this was the first year that, by January, she was fully booked for the year ahead. "I was thrilled," she says.
And then stories about a virus starting surfacing.
"When I heard the news, initially I thought there must be a mistake, that they were exaggerating," she says. "I didn't understand, and I didn't want to."
It soon became a "nightmare."
On March 9, she gave birth to her son, Elia, as Italy went into lockdown. Two days later -- the day Covid-19 was declared a pandemic -- Grechi, still in hospital, received a call from her cousin, a doctor. She'd called in on their grandmother, who was unwell -- and had called her an ambulance.
"She told me, 'Look, nonna had her lungs full,'" says Grechi. "That was when I realized that it was true -- so true that it had already arrived in my home."
In the meantime, Grechi's parents had also been complaining of a fever. "On the 13th, the ambulance took them away too," she says.
Two days later, her grandmother died, while her parents' conditioned worsened. Grechi was at home by now with her newborn, all thoughts of the B&B forgotten.
"We were destroyed," she says of her family, who couldn't even hold a funeral. "But all of Italy was feeling destroyed in those weeks.
"At a certain point, I thought, OK, I'll never work again but work doesn't matter anymore. The important thing is that people survive."
Her coworker, Giulia, became the "cancellation manager for nearly a year -- we had no enquiries, only cancellations." That entire year of proud pre-bookings either had to be refunded or turned into vouchers. Even now, in 2022, she has $11,000 worth of vouchers that still need to be redeemed.
Not that she was bothered about the B&B in March 2020, when both her parents were in ICU.
"One day the hospital called and said, prepare yourself because we have to intubate them. I thought they would both die. I called my brother, we said, at least they had a good life. After an hour they called back and said they were responding to oxygen helmets so wouldn't need intubation."
Her parents spent two months in hospital. It was June when Grechi was able to see them again.
"They saw Elia for the first time," she says. "We couldn't meet but I took him to their window and showed him to them."
Velona's Jungle tentatively reopened in July 2020, although visitors only started returning the following year. Her new rooms finally opened in fall 2021, and although business isn't what it was, Grechi hopes that 2022 will be better.
The tour operator
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The two weeks when Covid brought the planet to a standstill - CNN
