Rosemarie Hunter expected to be sitting on board a flight to Cayman on the morning of Tuesday, 23 Nov. Instead, she found herself sitting on the floor of JFK airport in New York, sobbing inconsolably after her plane left without her because she had not received her Cayman Islands travel authorisation.
Her JetBlue flight left at 7:50am. She says her travel authorisation arrived via email from Travel Cayman at 8:30am.
Travel Cayman says it emailed her Travel Declaration, authorising her trip to Cayman, the night before, but Hunter insists she never received it and it did not appear in her inbox, spam or junk folders.
Hunter, who has visited Cayman at least 10 times and had her honeymoon here, said she had spent 14 hours on trains travelling from her home in South Carolina to New York and had stayed at a hotel in the city before heading to JFK in a taxi for her early flight to Cayman.
She is fully vaccinated and would not be required to quarantine, so under a recently-adopted system, she could apply for a Travel Declaration from Travel Cayman. When applying, if the user does not have a securely verifiable vaccination QR code, Travel Cayman staff manually check uploaded scans of vaccination certificates before approving or denying an authorisation, and emailing it to the user.
Hunter said she had repeatedly called Travel Cayman to try to ensure her Travel Declaration arrived in time for her flight, but ultimately, she did not receive it until almost an hour after her flight to Cayman departed.
Casandra Morris, director of Travel Cayman, told the Compass she had checked the portal and found that an email had been sent to Hunter on 22 Nov., the day before her flight. She queried whether the email may have ended up in a junk folder, and encouraged anyone awaiting a travel authorisation document to check junk and other email folders.
When Hunter emailed Travel Cayman back after finally receiving the authorisation, she was also told that it had been emailed to her the day before. She said she has requested Travel Cayman resend that email to prove it had been sent, but as of Friday afternoon had not received it.
Hunter told the Compass that, on the day before her flight, when she still had not received the Travel Declaration via email, she called again and was told it had been approved and that it would be emailed to her that night.
Still without a Travel Declaration, and unable to get hold of anyone from Travel Cayman by phone at that time, she took a taxi to JFK airport at 3am and arrived at the check-in desk, where she was told she could not board the plane without the authorisation.
“The flight was leaving at 7:50am. I was turned away. I cried uncontrollably,” she said.
“There I was, a 59-year-old woman, sitting on the floor of the airport, crying, with my two suitcases… I was stuck there. I had nowhere to stay, no way to get on the plane… I was traumatised.”
She added, “I had told everyone I was going to be spending Thanksgiving in Cayman. I had a reservation for dinner at Luca, I was staying at a condo, I had hired a car. All they [Travel Cayman] had to do was send me the travel certificate. At 8:30am, they sent it to me.”
600-800 travel applications a day
Hunter’s tale of woe is among several complaints from people about delays in Travel Cayman authorisations, although most do appear to receive them before they travel, albeit sometimes at the last minute. Some people have turned to social media to share experiences of receiving permission to travel while queuing up to check in for their flights at airports, and some have reportedly cancelled their trips because they did not think they would get the authorisation in time.
Many others have complained about spending more than hour on hold waiting to talk to Travel Cayman staff, or of being on the line for a long time before getting cut off.
Travel Cayman’s Morris acknowledged that there are delays in people receiving their travel authorisations, pointing out that Travel Cayman is now receiving 600-800 applications a day, as visitors prepare to enter Cayman following the border reopening.
As well as the agency’s staff having to deal with a far higher number of applications than anticipated, delays are also being created due to people applying for Travel Declarations when they do not meet the criteria for a quarantine-free trip, she said.
“Unfortunately, people are not reading the website and the information placed there,” she said. “We tried to make it very user friendly. If you meet the criteria set out on the website, go ahead and do the Travel Declaration. If we need to manually verify, we have no problem in doing so if you meet the set criteria.
“We have been inundated with the amount that is coming through. People are applying for Travel Declarations when they don’t quality… We have to go through every application that comes in and let people know that their application has been denied because they don’t meet the criteria.”
Travel Cayman has issued a video to help people navigate their way through the application process.
Morris said another challenge Travel Cayman is facing is having to manually check local vaccinations, as many residents have not registered with the Health Services Authority’s MyHSA portal, which would contain a QR code related to their vaccination status.
Those with the HSA QR code, or a similarly securely verifiable vaccination code, can usually get automatic approval, while a scan of the printed vaccination certificate would need to be manually checked by a Travel Cayman member of staff.
“If they have the QR code from the HSA, it just takes three minutes to go through the Travel Declaration process,” Morris said. “If it comes through manually, it will take five days to process because of the large number of applications we’re getting now.”
“We’re seeing about 600-800 applications daily, and those are mostly manual. When you look at them, a lot of them don’t qualify for a Travel Declaration… There are a lot of people waiting to come to Cayman,” she added.
Remedying the situation
Morris said Travel Cayman is implementing internal system changes that should address the delays, which will roll out on Tuesday, 30 Nov.
Also, additional staff members had been added to the Travel Cayman team, she said, with 125 people working there, up from 91 in August.
While the number of quarantining travellers has fallen significantly since last weekend when the mandatory isolation for vaccinated passengers ended, Travel Cayman is still dealing with people in isolation. For example, vaccinated people from a country with a vaccination rate of under 60% must still undergo mandatory quarantine.
Morris said she expected the number of people in this category to grow as new work-permit holders enter the islands.
How it works
Travel Cayman offers two options for authorisation to enter Cayman – one is a Travel Declaration, which means the traveller is not required to quarantine, and the other is a Travel Request, for travellers who will need to isolate after landing here.
Those eligible for a Travel Declaration must:
- Have been fully vaccinated at least 14 days prior to date of arrival in Cayman;
- Have taken a full course of one of the WHO-approved vaccines;
- Hold a digital copy of a securely verifiable vaccination with a unique QR code or a vaccination record;
- Have been vaccinated in a jurisdiction where at least 60% of the population has received a first COVID-19 vaccine dose.
Those vaccinated in Cayman, United Kingdom, European Union, Bahamas, Barbados or Anguilla are eligible to be automatically approved for a Travel Declaration.
Anyone who does not meet the above criteria, or who is travelling with or staying with someone who does not meet it, such as children under 12, must apply for a Travel Request instead. That includes those whose vaccinations are not securely verifiable and those who are not vaccinated. If the Travel Request is approved, those travellers are required to quarantine.
Travellers who enter Cayman and who are not required to quarantine must take a lateral flow test, also known as an antigen test, at a medical facility two, five and 10 days after they arrive.
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Once approved, you can immediately download the document directly from your account in the Travel Cayman portal. You do not have to wait for the email. Hope this tidbit helps future travelers. It’s a shame Ms. Hunter did not know that.
Left in the exact same situation at LHR last August. Never got sent the vital QR code despite having called travel Cayman to check the day before that we had everything we needed. Eventually with the flight close to departure and my wife close to tears, a senior manager relented and let us on against the guidance, (after I proved our work permit status and that all hoops had been jumped through on my laptop.) Shoddy systems and people that are simply not doing a good enough job and don’t care about the utter chaos they cause.
Cayman is nice, and we love the place. That said, I’m not going to spend my vacation and the time before it worrying about nutty paperwork that may or not be delivered on time, and then deal with the hassle of on island testing during what is supposed to be a nice, relaxing vacation. We have been and will continue to go elsewhere until Cayman just opens up and decides to live with covid.
Hey Cayman, when your infection rate is higher than the areas most tourists come from, why are you afraid of the tourists and making it so hard for those tourists to visit you?? Their visit would seem to reduce the overall rate of Cayman infection while they are visiting. And why are you requiring testing to exit isolation?? Most tourists are coming from areas where covid infected individuals no longer have to isolate after 10 or 14 days of initial covid symptoms without any testing. So you’re making it hard for tourists to be approved to enter, with the mystery of will approval come in time, then making it potentially a mystery if tourists will be in quarantine. That’s not really attractive to tourists and, unfortunately despite noble intentions to protect Cayman population, it didn’t work and isn’t protecting Cayman. Time to recognize SARS COV-2 (or whatever it’s called) is evolving to be a whack-a-mole ever changeling agent that human-kind will need to adapt to, like our annual flue vaccines (descendants of the century-ago Spanish flue pandemic), except looks like instead of annual flue vaccines, we may be needing covid vaccines every 5-6 months.
This is another case of management and government being clueless. I tried to apply to arrive on 27 November 14 days in advance as required. Well the website wasn’t updated for phase 4 and I called three times to travel cayman and was told it was not up due to technical difficulties. One week after promised the site was up. I applied, uploaded all my documents, and received a message that my information would be reviewed and I would hear in 24 hours, After three days with no notice, I called and was told my paperwork was being processed and would hear the next day, two days later, nothing so I called again and was told I would hear later that day, which I did. If we are going to get tourists back government must have a system that works and people that care. Currently this is not the case. If a tourist would you take a chance on your holiday in a country that can’t get their act together or go somewhere with less regulation. Oh and we are going through all this to go to the country that has the highest rate of quarantine and public spread in the world.
Get your act together, Cayman. Stop drinking the Kool-aid!
One of the appeals for us visiting Cayman, historically, has been the first-world nature of how the CI operates. It was never about being locked into a guarded beach resort but rather a safe, well-run country we could travel freely in.
But these stories are keeping us away. Too much broken bureaucracy. Too many issues to worry about while there – all while it is still hugely expensive to come.
Will continue to monitor but stay away.
Cut them a break people! Cayman is trying to protect its inhabitants. Please grow up and realize that your wants and desires can wait – protecting human lives should trump vacation time!
Just to add one additional confusing point to the “travel declaration”. We applied to the travel Cayman web site and received a “Certificate of Travel”. Are these the same thing? This has the QR code and specifically states “This certificate authorizes the individual listed below to travel to the Cayman Islands” It further states “Travel Declaration is valid for a period of 3 months starting from your travel eligibility date” Is this a Travel Declaration?
Should offer this lady a free trip to make up for the distress and inconvenience she has suffered.
No one wants to go through this sort of lady minute anxiety just to go on vacation.
Get those approvals turned around in 2 hours or less
If Amazon can ship a parcel the same day surely Travel Cayman can manage to do this.