Summer in the Caribbean

Michelle Higgins of NY times explains why visiting the Caribbean is a more appealing option during summertime versus spending summer in the US.

HOUSTON in summer can be a miserable place.“It’s 100 degrees and 100 percent humidity — in the shade,” said Crystal Hadnott, a career counselor for a scholarship fund. That’s why many Houstonians often head to the beaches of Galveston, about an hour’s drive away, in search of a temporary respite from the city heat.

But last Memorial Day weekend, Ms. Hadnott and a few of her friends skipped the traffic jams and got on a plane instead — and soon found themselves at a hotel on the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, enjoying the sparkling turquoise waters, the nearly empty beaches and, most important, the cooling ocean breezes that kept daytime temperatures in the high 70s and low 80s. “It was beautiful,” Ms. Hadnott said. And not expensive: the entire cost, including airfare, hotel, airport transfers, all meals and drinks, was roughly $1,100 a person.

The experience was so great that this year, she and several of her friends went south again for Memorial Day, this time to Aruba.

The Caribbean in summer? It’s a more appealing option than you might think, especially if you’re looking for a bargain vacation this year. Here are a few reasons:

1. Prices are lower, with some hotels and resorts cutting as much as 60 percent off their winter rates.

2. Temperatures are typically only a few degrees higher than they are in the peak travel months of January through March. And they can be even lower than you’ll find at popular beach spots back in the United States. (For example, last Sunday, the temperature hit 93 in New York; it was 88 in Montego Bay, Jamaica and 88 on St. Lucia.)

3. The threat of hurricanes is certainly real, but perhaps not as great as you might imagine. Only one has hit the Caribbean before July 8 in the last decade — Hurricane Dennis, a Category 3 storm, which passed just east and north of Jamaica on July 7, 2005, producing hurricane conditions on the island. (This year the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects a “near normal or above normal” hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30 with the peak typically occurring from mid-August to mid-October.)

4. Did we mention that prices are lower?

This summer, rooms at Ritz-Carlton Golf and Spa Resort, Rose Hall, in Jamaica can be had for as little as $199 a night compared with $509 in mid-March. Starting rates at the Four Seasons Resort in Nevis drop to $335 a night from $490, and families traveling with children 18 or under can get a second room for half the cost or as low as $167.50 a night.

Despite the overall trend in rising airfares, prices of Caribbean packages, including airline tickets, are down 16 percent compared with peak travel, according to CheapTickets.com. That travel Web site is offering five-night getaways from Chicago starting at $769 a person to the Gran Meliã Puerto Rico in San Juan in June, and $1,345 a person at Aruba’s Hyatt Regency hotel in July from New York. FunJet Vacations has been offering three-night trips including airfare for as low as $650 a person from New York to Aruba or $765 a person to Barbados.

In some cases, practically entire islands are on sale. St. Maarten, the United States Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands are all offering island-wide summer promotions including a night free at a bevy of resorts and discounts for tourist activities. (Information at www.vacationstmaarten.com, www.usvitourism.vi, and www.caymanislands.ky.)

The islands themselves are getting a lot more aggressive about trying to lure visitors over the slower summer months with festivals that show off what the island has to offer in the way of food, history, culture or music. Each summer, for example, Barbados celebrates Crop Over (www.barbados.org/cropover.htm), a festival that can be traced back to the late 1780s, as a way to mark the end of the sugar-cane cutting season. Today, it’s a tourist draw involving calypso competitions and parades. Last year, Bonaire created the water-oriented Dive into Summer event (www.bonairediveintosummer.com), which it plans to repeat this year. Grenada’s Carnival, one of the island’s biggest festivals, begins in July and gains momentum leading up to Carnival Sunday, usually in the second week of August.

Other islands try to draw visitors with big-name stars. In July Jamaica hosts the Reggae Sumfest, which has featured such popular performers as Mary J. Blige, 50 Cent and Missy Elliott. And for the first time this year, the Cayman Islands will host a championship-boxing event — Cayman Knockout, to be held on Friday, June 20. In a super middleweight bout, the Olympic Gold medalist Andre Ward will fight the former Olympian Jerson Ravelo, and in a heavyweight match, Eddie Chambers will take on Raphael Butler. “We want tourism to the Caribbean to be a year-round exciting experience for travelers,” said Hugh Riley, a chief operating officer for the Caribbean Tourism Development Company.

Of course, there can be drawbacks to summering in the Caribbean. Some nonstop flights that run all winter long go on hiatus, requiring travelers whol want to fly from Philadelphia to St. Lucia, for example, to make an extra stop or two. Once on the island, travelers may find that a number of restaurants or shops are closed for the season, resorts are undergoing construction, and staffing may not be quite as robust as it is during the winter.

That said, summertime brings some tourist opportunities that are simply nonexistent any other time of year. From March to August, visitors to St. Lucia can take a Turtle Watch tour run by Heritage Tours (www.heritagetoursstlucia.org), where guests camp overnight on the beach and help measure the leatherback turtles and count the number of eggs they lay. Rain showers bring cool respites and lushness to the islands not usually found during the winter. And all deals aside, the dip in tourists during the summer allows for a sense of solitude that has become increasingly rare in the islands.

see more of this post on the following link:
http://travel.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/travel/15carib.html?ei=5087&em=&en=8f1bfa259681abfe&ex=1213588800&pagewanted=all