Nassau, The Bahamas —”The only way I know how to do this is to tell you the real stuff. We’ll talk about Sandals in a bit but this is a bigger story than Sandals and what happens here,” Adam Stewart began his speech to scores of travel advisors assembled in this Bahamian city this week.

Suddenly, a hush came over the packed conference room at the historic first Caribbean Showcase of the American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA) unfolding in the Sandals Royal Bahamian resort.

It was as if somehow everyone knew that the Sandals Resorts International (SRI) executive chairman was not just going to be delivering the usual marketing speech in which he would extol the unmatchable beauty of the Caribbean region, inviting visitors to cavort in its warm blue waters and laze away on sun-kissed beaches.

The speech would give a rare glimpse into the mind of Stewart at the moment when the novel coronavirus pandemic slammed the door shut on the entire tourism industry and, of course, the sprawling Stewart hotel empire which he had helped to build alongside his late great father, Gordon “Butch” Stewart.

“We have all been through a living nightmare the last couple of years,” he continued. “Coming out of 2019, the single best year on record in the history of travel, it was inconceivable, I couldn’t imagine it, that in this modern era, with modern technology, with all of the medical infrastructure, with everything that we have built, with the most fascinating minds in God’s creation, that COVID could have been a reality.

“I will never forget the moment when I got the phone call to say that all the airports in the Caribbean were going to close. We had just had another anniversary of September 11 [the crashing of two planes by terrorists into the World Trade Centre in New York], which we will never forget.

“Of course, if you look back to what September 11 was, it was 12 days of real impact on the travel industry, and it wasn’t the world. But this time [with COVID], it was the entire world!

“That moment of trying to process shutting down the ports of these Caribbean islands that are completely dependent on international trade for their existence, it was just something unfathomable, we couldn’t digest it.

“And one by one we closed the entire tourism infrastructure — every hotel, every restaurant, every tour operation; our farmers couldn’t sell anymore, our taxi drivers, many of them just got loans on brand new fleets, they were shut down. And it was eerie. It was absolutely indescribable.

“And then, the can-do feeling started to kick in. To my eyes, and from where I sit in a position to work with this amazing infrastructure, people started to come together to do what we do in travel — travel advisors, cruise ships, airlines, tour operators, hotel supply sides, companies. And we decided we would figure this out.

“The buzzword became ‘protocol’ — a word that unless you worked with dignitaries and in government, it’s not an everyday occurrence in your life. You couldn’t go to Google and say ‘how do I write a protocol for a global pandemic to do with travel… and this whole world started to come together, of just figuring it out, finding the balance.

“We were all stuck at home. We had to isolate. We had to social distance, nobody ever heard that term before in their lives. In my home office on Zoom; God bless Zoom. Whoever created Zoom, give that guy a raise!

“I’m sitting in my office in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and I have this TV and I am watching little split screens of the different newscasts and, it wasn’t a monthly thing, it wasn’t a weekly thing, it wasn’t a daily thing. Policy was changing by the hour.

“I’m watching this television and everything coming through the news media said to me the ‘sky is falling’. It was the end of the world as we know it.

“But as I sat in my chair and leaned back and looked to the left out of my window, the sky over Jamaica was never bluer, the water was never clearer, the sand was never whiter. And if there’s one thing I know about the Caribbean, is that it just got more and more beautiful the more CNN and FOX and MSNBC and everyone said the sky was falling.

“Make no mistake. This was a horrible thing, an absolutely horrible thing. But those of us from this part of the world, and those of us, like you, who have been selling to this world, the word ‘resilience’ has never had more relevance than at this moment in travel.

“In our darkest, darkest hours, one by one, we dealt with the challenges at hand. We made the best decisions with the information that we had at hand… We had this 14 million people in the Caribbean saying ‘what next?’

“But ladies and gentlemen, there is one thing we didn’t jump on. Not even for a moment did we buy into the false narrative that travel would end, that people would stop exploring the beauty of the world.

“As a matter of fact, I would go further to say to you, that maybe, just maybe, for the first time we actually really appreciated what travel meant to our lives, something that we may have always taken for granted because we thought it was always going to be there… Until someone said you can’t get on an airline.

“…So we went into high gear in the Caribbean to keep its ecosystem intact, to make sure that when the time was right, that not only would we be ready, but we would be first. And we did it because, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council [WTTC], the Caribbean has been the fastest recovering and growing region on planet earth for travel.

“Now, as a Caribbean national, I know why. It’s because there is more fascination here than anywhere else in the world, there is more natural beauty here in this region than anywhere else in the world, it’s because it’s at the doorstep of the greatest economies of the world— the culture, the music, the flair, all of it coming together to make sure that when they were travelling or returning to travel, they chose us.

“I stood in the lobby of Sandals Montego Bay… and I saw these young couples, they had moved their bookings five, six, seven times. Nobody complained. We just got on with it and did what we had to do. These couples were just so happy to get to Jamaica that if we had given them cold showers and cold food, they would have said ‘thank you’.

“So in Sandals, we never gave up, we never faltered, we never hesitated. As a matter of fact, we bought four hotels during the pandemic..

“I want to recognise my dad and so many of you who stood beside him over so many years. I don’t think there has ever been a bigger champion in travel, not Caribbean travel but global travel, than ‘Butch’ Stewart.”