Between waves
By Virginia López Valiente
Managing Director of Cruises News Media Group and Editor of CruisesNews magazine
Editorial from CruisesNews magazine no. 59 – December 2021
Your stomach churns when you think about how we ended 2020 without vaccinations, once we accepted that we weren't in a dystopian dream and that the ERTE and the ICO entered through the door of your devastated office and settled in.
Christmas without family, events without people, pixelated faces, empty boats, and daily scoreboards. Even so, we were optimistic despite knowing that the waves we would continue to talk about were not in the seas.
But here I am, a year later, working my fourth quarter, savoring successes with more work than I ever imagined, and above all, with my loved ones in good health. I shouldn't and don't want to complain about being exhausted, because this exhaustion is the good kind, the kind you savor, and above all, the kind you're grateful for. We were able to hold the International Cruise Summit at just the right time, when everyone was eager to see each other again and attend the first and only international cruise event in Europe. We were able to meet up and enjoy it. Shortly after, we went to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria to celebrate the most special edition of the Excellence Cruise Awards, and once again, it was a reunion filled with optimism.
So what's next is to thank my people, my team, my clients, my friends, all of them mixed together and who have made us get here as we are, well, very well.
The desire to travel is multiplying, and with it come bookings, those bookings that are warming up the engines of my sector and that foreshadow a return to the figures of 2019 very soon.
However, I've had that feeling again that things change from one day to the next, and that we go from joy to worry in the blink of an eye. How did we go in just four days from seeing smiling faces planning their cruise vacations to "I'm not leaving the house." Should I book that flight or not? Should we have dinner or not?.
Before the televised panic takes hold, let's remember that we've gotten this far through hard work and at a very high price. We know far more about this than we did before, which was practically nothing. We're vaccinated and have protocols for almost everything. Precautions? All of them, but let's not think we're back to square one, because nothing could be further from the truth.
Let's plan for next year by adding backup plans, but let's not discard the original plan. I trust science and those who guide us. After all, who am I, and what qualifications do I have, to question everything I see about this crisis or what the experts say? Our future has incorporated a variable we didn't have before; let's work with it, but for goodness sake, let's keep working.
