The two weeks when Covid brought the world to a standstill

(CNN) — Borders closing, travelers stranded, and small businesses haemorrhaging money — that’s how those in the travel industry will remember the period two years ago, when the world closed down in a matter of days.

On March 11, 2020, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Authority, and countries around the world were beginning to figure out emergency border policies in a bid to protect their citizens.

In travel, that meant vacationers scrambling to get home, and communities torn between needing visitors, and fearing what they might bring.

The two weeks around March 11 dealt a blow to the travel world, the likes of which had never been seen before. It’s one that many small businesses and employees have yet to recover from.

Here nine travel experts share their memories of March 2020 — from the tour guide stranded in Italy, to the hotelier in Dominica, who was forced to close the hotel she’d just reopened after hurricane devastation.

The hotelier

Avril Coipel: “It was like something you read in novels.”

Avril Coipel

The award-winning eco resort bad been destroyed in 2017 by Hurricane Maria. With virtually all the staff drawn from the surrounding area, it was a tragedy for the local communities, as well as for the hotel.

A grand reopening had been planned for February 2020, and things were looking good — the hotel’s great reputation meant the bookings were rolling in. More importantly, says Coipel, “the local communities were looking forward to the opening of the resort — we hired staff who hadn’t been able to get a steady job since 2017.”

In December, just weeks from their reopening ceremony, she saw the news about a virus taking hold in China. “It sounded far away,” she says. “When it reached Italy it still sounded far away. When we started hearing it was in the US, we said, OK, that’s a little close — and then suddenly it was in the Caribbean.”

The pandemic would have devastating consequences for Coipel and her coworkers. On February 15, they’d had a grand reopening ceremony, attended by government ministers, while bookings stacked up. It looked like 2020 would be as successful as the good old days had been.

But soon after their opening, they were watching covid outbreaks on cruise ships in the news. By early March, the cancellations were rolling in as they watched footage of empty streets in Europe — “it was like something you read about in novels,” says Coipel.

“By the time it reached mid March, we’d had all our bookings canceled, all the way down to December,” she says. “By the time we closed, we didn’t have any guests. All the cards fell down.”

The Rosalie Bay Eco Hotel, Dominica

Ambo Visuals

Rosalie Bay closed on March 23, as Dominica went into lockdown just after. Coipel had to lay off nearly all her staff, slashing a team of 51 to a skeleton crew of just four to handle cancellations, plus security and landscaping to stop the forest taking over the resort.

It was devastating for the local community, as well as for Coipel personally.

“We were full of hope, full of promise, looking forward to the future,” she says.

“It was a very sad time — you close, stay closed for two years, finally get in a position to reopen — and six weeks later you have to shut down again. Our staff is 95% local, the resort is locally owned — it has a high impact on the surrounding communities.”

As for Coipel herself, she found it “extremely depressing.”

“When you’re very confident in what you’re doing and finally find yourself in a position where you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t like it,” she says.

“But the pandemic was new, bigger countries were really struggling — we didn’t know if the same thing would happen to us in Dominica. As a small island, there was concern that our health infrastructure would be overwhelmed.

“We had to deal not just with the reality of closing the resort and laying off staff, but also rising panic.”

She kept in close contact with other hotels on the island — they advised each other, and “gave each other that mental encouragement that all of us needed.”

Things would get better. The hotel reopened in July 2020 for domestic travel, and a month later for international visitors. The staff are back.

“2021 started looking up, and we think 2022 will be better,” says Coipel.

The flight attendant

Dana Schaefer was told by her coworkers to ‘have a gameplan.’

Dana Schaefer

It was mid-March 2020 when, taking stock while in North Carolina between flights, Dana Schaefer noticed her world had changed.

“I remember going through Charlotte airport and it was like a scary movie,” says the flight attendant.

“It was just so empty, everything was closed — it was just flight crews walking through, no passengers.”

Based out of Miami, Schaefer was working for a major airline — which, by that point, was telling crew to bring their own food with them on trips.

“Even on layovers people were getting stuck because we were flying with no passengers, and once restaurants and even hotel restaurants started closing, we didn’t want to be without food,” she says.

By then, Covid-19 had already been declared a pandemic. As someone mainly flying within the US, Schaefer says the realization of what was happening was “pretty gradual, and then, boom — flights were canceled and there were no people in the airports.”

As a relative newbie — Schaefer had started flying in 2018 — she was unsure what to expect, but her more experienced coworkers could see the writing on the wall, comparing it to the aftermath of 9/11 — and saying this was worse.

“They were trying to make sure I had a gameplan, and wasn’t thinking, it’s no big deal,” she says. In October 2020, she would be furloughed for eight months.

Schaefer remembers those days around March 11 as “very scary.” Suddenly her catering trolley was laden with masks and gloves.

“Once people found out how contagious it was, I was scared to continue flying and risk exposing my family,” she says.

“It was a big mystery [how it spread] and I remember being scared to touch anything on the plane. It felt like a waiting game — even if I do my best to be protected, am I going to get it?”

It was her sociable personality that had encouraged Schaefer to be a flight attendant — formerly in customer service, she made the leap because “you get to talk to so many different people and I love that.” But all that swiftly changed. “My job went from being hands on to you really don’t do anything,” she says.

“It was honestly kind of depressing. We were just walking through and picking up trash, not really interacting with anyone. And then you’d get to your layover and weren’t allowed to go out or do anything.”

Now she’s back in the air in what she calls “weird times,” where passenger aggression is at an all time high. “I just hope it gets back to normal,” she says.

The tour guide

Francesca made it back to her beloved Rome (pictured) in 2022.

Courtesy Francesca Folmi

By the time they started, Italy was the global center of the pandemic. Just 14 people turned up.

“I started the welcome meeting saying, ‘OK, let’s get the c-word out of the way, let’s let out all our fears and frustrations, then that’ll be it and we can put it behind us,'” she says.

“It’s unbelievable now but I really thought it was going to be OK. There weren’t restrictions locally, no suppliers had pulled out, the itinerary was due to go ahead.”

That night, walking to dinner, the group was confronted by a woman wearing a mask, shouting at them to spread out from each other.

“You could see the panic on her face — she was the first person in Italy on whom I saw the fear of the virus,” says Folmi, from Guernsey, UK.

The next morning, they drove south for a tour of Pompeii, continuing to Naples. “Things were going at warp speed,” says Folmi — while there’d been no restrictions in Rome, by the time they arrived in Naples the hotel was asking them to stay six feet apart and to avoid common areas.

They were booked for dinner with entertainment; they got dinner. Not that it mattered.

“By the end they were getting on famously, they were super excited on the coach home,” says Folmi.

“I put music on, and was thinking, finally, they’re going to relax a bit more.

“And then my phone pinged with a news alert: Italy was going into lockdown, effective immediately.

“They were still singing Miley Cyrus.”

As they got to the hotel, Folmi informed her group that the tour was over and she was going to help…