Grand Cayman "Thinking" About Letting Cruise Ships Return

A full day of meetings with cruise line reps resulted in full stomachs and nothing else.

The Cayman Compass reports that on February 2, eight representatives from various cruise lines and the Florida-Caribbean Cruise Association spent a day and a night in meetings to discuss when Grand Cayman will finally join the other Caribbean islands in allowing cruise ships to return.

Tourism Minister Kenneth Bryan after spending a day without a resolution, “At the very top of the list are our health and safety protocols that will allow cruise shops to return while keeping our community safe, because, right now, due to the pandemic, we have no cruise tourism at all, and that’s a sad day for our country. So, our immediate priority has been to discuss a way forward that will allow cruise ships to return while keeping our communities safe.”

Michele Paige, president of the FCCA, told the Compass that at least one of the conditions the government had hoped to place on the cruise ships before allowing them to make stops in Cayman – to ensure passengers underwent lateral flow tests before disembarking – could not happen, as it would not be practical. “Could you imagine having 3,000 or 4,000 passengers do testing?” she asked. “They already had to take a tender into port which took about half an hour or 45 minutes, maybe even an hour if they had to queue up. Now they have to stand in line to do a test.”