This past Sunday 17 Celebrity cruise passengers were robbed at gunpoint while on a tour in St. Kitts. Fortunately no one was harmed but I’m sure the 16 adults and 1 child that were involved in the incident will be irreparably affected. While on a ship sponsored tour called “Essential St. Kitts” the tour bus encountered a blockade in the road on their way to “Brimstone Hill”. The gunmen set a trap in the form of a fallen tree in the center of the road creating a makeshift blockade. When the bus driver exited the bus to remove the obstruction , two gunmen ran out of the bushes and robbed the passengers. After-wards the perpetrators retreated to the cover of the woods to make their getaway.

Now I understand that some people will make untrue statements about how unsafe these islands are and denigrate anyone “stupid” enough to want to visit, but the truth is “crime happens”. These sorts of things happen whether you are on vacation or not and whether you are in St. Kitts or the Big Apple. You could say it’s (bad) luck of the draw whether anything like this ever happens to you, hopefully it never will.

So, if you are looking for someone to start banging the drum for a boycott of St. Kitts you should probably leave this website and try searching on “Google”, I’m sure someone has already started a mini-site or “Facebook” group about it. Instead I will use this incident as an opportunity to once again underscore the importance of vacation safety. Oftentimes when people are enjoying leisure time they let their guard down, that obviously wasn’t the case in this incident but it can still serve as a reminder.

Let me emphatically state there was nothing any of these passengers could have done to prevent this from happening. However, I also want to point out that once things were set in motion everyone did the right thing, they gave the gunmen what they wanted. It has been reported that in the robbery the passengers lost jewelry, money and cell phones but no one was hurt. No one tried to be a tough guy or a hero, everyone remained level-headed and they all realized they weren’t going to lose anything that couldn’t easily be replaced. This is the single most important thing to remember there is no material item that cannot be replaced.