Sheltered Paradise

With spectacular beaches, top-tier resorts, and a stellar Covid record, Anguilla is growing even more irresistible.

- Nikki Ekstein

Anguilla, like an African safari camp or St. Barts with its dive-bomb approach via plane, is one of those places made more special by being difficult to reach. The rare Caribbean island without a cruise marina, it has a tiny airport that only last month started welcoming one major U.S. carrier—American Airlines, with a direct flight from Miami.

Unless you’re among the visitors with a private jet, arrival is typically by a small Caribbean airline that flies noisy charter planes or by a choppy 45-minute ferry ride from nearby St. Maarten.

“Anguilla has always had an issue with access,” says Kenroy Herbert, chairman of the Anguilla Tourist Board. “But we don’t want to open the floodgates, so to speak.” That’s a pretty unconventional thing for a tourism executive to say, particularly one in service of a 14,000-person island the size of Manhattan that claims virtually no industry beyond, well, tourism.

But Herbert has made that stance— which prioritizes a low-volume tourism strategy focusing on high-spending visitors—a selling point, especially during the pandemic. In August 2020, Anguilla reopened its borders with a unique “bubble” concept designed to insulate travelers and locals from transmission risk by requiring visitors to test aggressively before and after arrival in addition to remaining quarantined in villas for at least 10 days before being allowed to explore.