Bouncing back from Beryl: How 3 Montego Bay resorts handled the hurricane

The general manager for Hyatt Ziva and Zilara Rose Hall was only nine weeks on the job when Hurricane Beryl hit Jamaica.

“I had the baptism by fire with Hurricane Beryl, which luckily or unluckily depending on how you want to talk about it, was my 16th hurricane so I’m kind of used to them,” Adrian Whitehead, who is originally from the U.K. but has worked in the Caribbean since 1996, tells Travel Courier on location in Montego Bay. “We were fully operational 72 hours after.”

Although he pointed out that a few shingles and a wedding gazebo still needed to be replaced, looking around the resort it’s virtually impossible to tell that a hurricane rolled in a mere month ago.

“It’s like a phoenix, when things go down you get bigger and better every time,” he says.

While the southern part of the island did sustain more significant damage, Angella Bennett, Regional Director Canada for the Jamaica Tourist Board, pointed out that the Sangster International Airport in Montego Bay reopened within a day.

“There was a week of a lull because people were unsure but then the bookings started coming back in again,” she says. “All our tour operators are predicting a strong winter.”

Bennett credits the local Global Tourism Resilience & Crisis Management Centre for keeping everyone informed during that period.

“That fed us information that the airports were closing, when the airports were reopening, what was the state of the destination so we were able to feed that to the tour operators, to the travel agents, easily,” she said. “It’s a combination of hoteliers, attractions, tourism stakeholders, public and private, and they dedicate their time to monitoring the different areas and getting reports back in so that worked very well because at every stage we knew what was happening.”

Although resort areas in Montego Bay, Ocho Rios and Negril sustained minor damages, she says the majority of properties along the tourism corridor resumed operations almost immediately.

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