Work Here! Tourist-Starved Caribbean Woos Homebound Workers
- Islands have mostly avoided the worst of the pandemic
- With no cruise ships, they urge workers to stay for months
As soon as London’s first coronavirus lockdown ended last summer, Abbie Sheppard, 24, took a quick vacation to the island of Bermuda.
Four months later, the vacation is long over but she’s still there -- one of the thousands of people lured to islands in the Caribbean and the North Atlantic by programs aimed at snagging remote workers.
“I just never went back,” Sheppard, the chief of staff at the celebrity-booking company Cameo, said by telephone.
With traditional tourism hammered by the pandemic and many in Europe and North America working from home amid shorter days and dropping temperatures, islands across the Caribbean are trying to attract longer-term visitors. It’s the sun-kissed version of the road-tripping and temporary-rental trend seen over the summer.
Barbados, the Cayman Islands, Aruba, Puerto Rico, and St. Kitts and Nevis are among those wooing home-bound toilers from abroad. This is distinct from pandemic promotions by some islands to sell second passports at a discount.