January 12th, 2019
BVI Traveller is in the BVI and I can definitely see that things are much, much better than this time last year. In fact, based on my reporting I can see there has been a tremendous push to get businesses, charter boats, vacation rentals and restaurants open for the tourist season.
The buildings in Road Town have either been restored or are surrounded by scaffolding indicating that they will be completed soon. Roads around the island of Tortola that were a potholed, gravel/dirt nightmare last year have been resurfaced. The beaches and water are as beautiful as ever including Smuggler’s Cove pictured above. And finally the post-Irma brown scrub has been replaced everywhere with lush green vegetation.
BVI Traveller will be here for the next three months and will be updating our reporting first hand on the progress of the recovery. But, to my eye things are looking pretty good right now!
BVI Traveller was created in September of 2017 to help tourism in the British Virgin Islands recover from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Irma.
To that end, we met our goals. In the past 7 years there have been over 1.2 million visits to the website and over 3 million pages have been viewed. There are over 1,000 pages on the site featuring news posts and detailed listings on all hotels, villas, restaurants and sailing charters located in the BVI. The BVI Government and many business, hotels, villas and sailing charters have all agreed that the site “moved the needle on tourism” after Irma.
The site, however, has run its course. It has served its purpose by bringing visitors and local businesses together to rebuild the tourist industry and it is now time to shut down operations for good.
I want to thank everyone for your help and support.
Chuck Metter