FIRE IN THE BOILER ROOM. It is my perception that the Riu people handled the fire incident very well, and that the island’s fire department showed up in record time. It was an unfortunate incident in the boiler room, and in reality it could happen in any boiler room on the island, or around the globe. But what was remarkable about that specific Saturday morning was the spirit of One Happy Island that manifested itself five minutes into the emergency when the Fire Brigade the Police Department, representatives of the Aruba Tourism Authority and the Aruba Hotel & Tourism Association all showed up to form a Crisis Board, sending 200 guests to the airport in time for their flights and booking all others into the neighboring Palm Beach resorts. The Hilton Aruba Caribbean Resort & Casino, the Occidental Grand, the Holiday Inn and the Riu Palace Antillas, all welcomed guests for an all inclusive stay, as they transferred from the Riu Palace to continue their vacations. I imagine that Riu Palace Aruba was the island’s best client Saturday night as it booked about 800 guests into its neighbors, while the government technical department would be inspecting all systems, before flicking the electric switch of the resort’s front tower back up.
Compliments for the loving, supportive and caring Riu Palace staffers who assisted guests above and beyond and performed very well under stressful situations.
A reader suggested: We need to dip the island in seawater to chase away the FUKU – apparently the fireworks for New Year’s were not enough!
ZIKA SHMIKA. It seems that Zika is hurting the island as far as the willingness of people to travel, clumping South America, Latin America and the Caribbean, into one Zika infested swamp. That’s such BS. It’s just the Scare Du Jour, and as a result some of our hotels are not doing so well, this winter.
The Aruba Tourism Authority, and the MinHealth decided to take a reactive stand, state some facts, and hang back. I think the time has come to venture out BIG and to tell the world it’s all baloney!
I checked out the latest information on the CDC website, the Center for Disease Control & Prevention and they tell you: “We Don’t Know.” We don’t know how the virus affects pregnancies, we don’t know how likely Zika will pass to a fetus, we don’t know if a fetus infected, will develop birth defects, in short there is NO evidence that the Zika Virus causes anything more than a mild flu. The whole Zika Virus scare is a media fabricated story, for lack of other good headlines.
We have to go out slugging this week, and kill that theory that there are Zika carrying mosquito under every Divi tree, otherwise we’ll lose bookings. And I can see by the special rates posted on line that the resort’s are discounting, which is never a good sign, in the high season.
PS. The same is happening in Curacao, and on the other former Netherlands Antilles.
In fact almost the entire Caribbean has the problem, and we should do what St. Lucia does, when it announced: ZIKA FREE stays, being proactive instead of sticking their heads into the sand. St. Lucia recommended itself as an alternative vacation spot to Zika infected countries, and we should do the same, recommend Aruba as Safe Babymoon Destination Where You Can Avoid the Zika Virus, and have a great time.
The “scare du jour” will blow away, meanwhile please Don’t Fall For The Zika Virus Hoax.
