When Royal Caribbean's Enchantment of the Seas arrived at Belize Thursday, passengers were delayed three and a half hours in disembarking while local immigration and health authorities cleared the ship. The delay was caused by three crew members aboard who were quarantined with symptoms of influenza (possibly H1N1 at that point). But that wasn't really the big story in Belize.
What the local media was at the pier for was that Enchantment had a famous person aboard. John Travolta has boarded the ship in Ft. Lauderdale on Monday for the 5-night cruise (that had already called at Key West and Cozumel), and he planned to disembark at Belize and fly home from there on his private jet.
Travolta wasn't inconvenienced by the delay (won't you sleep better now knowing that?), because he was planning to spend the day aboard Enchantment, and disembarked at 4:15pm just before the ship was scheduled to depart. But if you have a private jet to take you home from Belize, you wouldn't necessarily want to take the cruise ship's tender ashore, either. Yes, according to the local 7 News Belize website, Mr. Travolta had chartered his own boat to ferry him from the ship, not to the public tender dock but to the private Radisson dock. Once there the VIP treatment continued. Government immigration and customs officers met him there and processed his entry at the hotel.
According to the website, seeing the local media and fans waiting, he at first refused to leave the boat claiming he wanted privacy because he was on vacation. He did eventually leave, waived to the crowd, went into the Radisson where he waited until 6pm when he left for the airport and boarded his private jet there.
Traveling is different when you have unlimited funds.
