In a season of stagnation, Georgia Steel was radiating.
A digital influencer and reality television star, Ms. Steel, left England for Dubai in late December, where she promoted lingerie on Instagram from a luxury hotel. By January, she was in a resort in the Maldives, where spa treatments include body wraps with sweet basil and coconut powder.
“We’re drippin ‘,” Steel, 22, told her 1.6 million Instagram fans in a post showing her waving in a bikini through tropical waters. Remember that the Covid-19 effects in Britain and the Maldives were escalating, or that England had just announced its third exclusion.
The Maldives, an island nation off the coast of India, not only tolerates tourists like me. Do not steal, but insist on visiting them. More than 300,000 have arrived since the country reopened its borders last summer, including a few dozen influencers, social media stars with big fans who are regularly paid for falconry products. Many governments have paid tribute to the court and travel with paid junk to exclusive resorts.
According to the government, its open-door strategy is ideal for a tourism-dependent country whose decentralized geography – about 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean – helps with social distance. Since the borders reopened, less than 1 percent of visitors have tested positive for the coronavirus, official data show.
“You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow,” said Thoyyib Mohamed, the managing director of the country’s official PR agency. “But for now, I have to say: this is a very good case study for the whole world, especially tropical destinations.”
The strategy of the Maldives poses epidemiological risks and underlines how remote holiday resorts and the influencers, according to them, have become hotspots for controversy.
While people around the world hide, some influencers have posted about fleeing to small towns or foreign lands, encouraging their followers to do the same, endangering the residents and others with whom they come in contact on their journey.
“So we’m not in a pandemic, are we?” Beverly Cowell, an administrator in England, commented on me. Steel’s Instagram post and voice given to many people who consider such travelers as the rules.
Francisco Femenia-Serra, a tourism expert at Nebrija University in Madrid who studies the marketing of influencer, says the influence of the influencers to visit during the pandemic.
“What is wrong with the Maldives campaign is the timing,” he said, noting that it started before travelers could be vaccinated. ‘It’s down. This is not the time to do it. ”
When the Maldives closed its borders last year to guard against the virus, they did not make the decision: according to Nashiya Saeed, a consultant, more than 60,000 of the country’s 540,000 people are more than any other industry in the private sector. in the Maldives who recently wrote a government study on the economic impact of the pandemic.
“When tourism stopped, there was no income in the country,” she said. Saeed said. Many dismissed resort workers living in the capital, Malé, were forced to return to their home islands because they could no longer afford them, she added.
As the health authorities worked to curb local outbreaks, President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih’s advisers developed a strategy to restart tourism as soon as possible. One advantage was that most of the country’s luxury resorts are on their own islands, making isolation and contact detection much easier.
“We really planned it, we knew what our benefits were and we played for it,” he said. Solih spokesman Mohamed Mabrook Azeez said.
When the Maldives reopened in July, health officials required PCR tests, including safety protocols, but tourists were not subject to mandatory quarantines. Around the same time, the country’s PR agency launched its international marketing campaign, urging travelers to ‘rediscover’ the Maldives.
The government and local businesses have also invited influencers to stay at resorts and wave about it on social media. What they did.
“If it’s cloudy, it should be sunshine!” Ana Cheri, an American influencer with more than 12 million followers, wrote from a Maldives resort in November, a few weeks before her home state of California imposed drastic locks. “Splash and swing into the weekend!”
Me. Cheri did not respond to several emails after initially agreeing to comment. A publication by Mrs. Steel, a star in the reality show ‘Love Island’, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Even before the pandemic, influencers experienced adversity when their travels offended. Some who have posted about travel in Saudi Arabia, for example, have been criticized for the role of the kingdom in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Influencers from England in particular have come under fire in recent weeks for banning the closing rules that are essential to all travel. Some defended their travels, saying travel was essential to their jobs, while others apologized under public pressure.
“I was like, ‘Oh, now, it’s legal, so it’s good,'” the influential KT Franklin said in an apology video about her trip to the Maldives. “But it’s not good. It’s really irresponsible and reckless and shows deafness. ”
At the end of January, Britain banned direct flights to and from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates as the Covid-19 cargo soared in both places. The lower immigration rules and the perpetual sunshine of the emirate have made it a popular place for social media. But as the number of cases increased, officials closed pubs and taverns for a month, limiting hotels, shopping malls and beach clubs to 70 percent.
Officials in the Maldives, which has welcomed nearly 150,000 tourists so far this year, have said they do not intend to impose similar restrictions.
The country reported nearly 20,000 total coronavirus infections, equivalent to about 4 percent of its population, and 60 deaths. But no resort clusters have caused widespread community transfers, and officials say the risk is low because some resort workers have to be quarantined when traveling between islands.
“All in all, I think we managed to do it well,” although some tourists tested positive before leaving the country, Dr. Nazla Rafeeg, head of control of communicable diseases at the Government Health Agency, said. “Our guidelines upheld the actual implementation.”
Many influencers and celebrities have faced the depravity of other social media users sitting at home. Instagram accounts have sprung up to name and shame tourists who seem to carry rules abroad over social distance and mask.
As a result, some influencers have refrained from posting travel content during the pandemic – or at least disabled comments on their posts – because they do not want to cause controversy.
Raidh Shaaz Waleed, whose company arranged for Ms. Steel, me. Cheri and more than thirty other influencers would visit the Maldives through a campaign called Project FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. None of the invited visitors, according to him, tested positive for the coronavirus.
“If you are considerate of the safety guidelines, and if you distance yourself socially, you can still have fun,” he said.
Not everyone shares his optimism.
Mrs. Ms Cowell, the administrator in England, who commented on the message “We are drippin ‘” from the Maldives, Mrs. Steel, said in an email that it was irresponsible to promote such a trip during England’s third exclusion.
The post was particularly difficult to take in, she added, as it appeared on the day she learned that her grandmother, who lives in a nursing home, had contracted the virus.
‘Cowell (22) said that not only do they cancel or create a negative environment online, but also to make sure we do not put celebrities on a pedestal where they feel invincible and they can do what they want. ”
Taylor Lorenz reported.