Could your COVID bubble include Cuba?
Travel agent hopes to send people south without need to self-quarantine upon return
HALIFAX — There is currently no Nobel prize for travel agents. However, if Elayne Pink’s idea works out, she is sure to be somehow recognized for her brilliance.
Pink, the co-owner of Absolute Travel Specialists in Halifax, wants to move the Atlantic bubble south. More specifically, to the Caribbean, for seven days at a time.
Her plan is to partner with an airline and a resort to take Atlantic Canadians on direct flights to either Cuba or the Dominican Republic, and confine them to that resort to minimize potential exposure to COVID-19.
“It came from (the fact that) we need to move our industry along a little bit, and how are we going to do it,” Pink said Friday.
“I will be picking places that don’t have many off-resort options. It won’t be hard. Cuba currently has next to no COVID. Mexico is one of my favourite destinations, but there’s too much off-resort activity so I’m not doing Mexico. With the Dominican, I’m still working on details.”
Pink is looking for either a resort that holds roughly the same number of guests as a plane, or one that has several mini resorts on a large property, each self-contained.
“It depends, because I have not finalized my carriers and whatnot, but 250 people probably. It’s going to have to be picked based on containing my group to a resort,” she said.
“I’m actually having the tour companies pick the resort for me that can best handle public health protocol measures.”
Word about her idea leaked before she had finalized details and her Facebook page blew up.
Asked about potential obstacles to her scheme, Pink said
there’s only one.
“Dr. Strang being openminded for me,” she said.
“I understand that it’s going to be hinging on epidemiology and a bunch of other factors between now and travel time. I get that. I have to be in a very low to no COVID destination.
“Whether it be Air Canada Vacations, whether it be Transat, or Sunwing, they’re the ones I’ll be working with here to put together what I’m asking them to do for me.”
Current regulations would have travellers returning to Nova Scotia from outside the bubble self-isolating for 14 days. Pink is going to ask chief medical officer Robert Strang for special dispensation for her groups.
“In a perfect world, I want the 14-day quarantine either removed or drastically dropped down to a lesser time frame to sell this. That’s going to be quite important,” she said.
“That’s going to depend on Dr. Strang, and that’ll depend on where we are, come closer to travel time with the epidemiology. I have no problem in ... testing, whether it be prior to travel, whether it’s these rapid tests coming back. If it’s required, people are pretty open to that, from what I can see.”
Pink would also be requiring employees at the resort she deals with to be comprehensively tested. She said that won’t be a problem
“They want their tourism business as well, and they want to be safe, too.”
Each stay would be for seven days, and Pink hopes to have the first flight take off in February.
She said she’ll be able to add to her charters from places like Newfoundland, if the epidemiology allowed.
“Other than that, I think I can fill it right from Halifax so I’m not too concerned with going too far past that.”