While COVID-19 travel restrictions forced many Americans to cancel their long-dreamed-of summer vacations to Europe, Beyonce and Jay-Z found a way to visit the continent, where they and their children reportedly cruised on a luxury “superyacht” along the coast of Croatia.
The Dubrovnik Times said the music power couple “had plenty of room to stretch out” on the elegant 350-foot-long yacht, Lana, which costs about $2 million per week to lease. They celebrated Beyonce’s 39th birthday by enjoying a romantic lunch on the “heart-shaped island” of Galešnjak, before flying out of Dubrovnik airport earlier this week.
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But Beyonce and Jay-Z were not the only American celebrities to sail into Dubrovnik this summer, the Dubrovnik Times said. Magic Johnson and Owen Wilson also were spotted “enjoying the sights and sounds of the pearl of the Adriatic this year.”
That some rich American celebrities found a way to travel to Europe this summer raises questions about whether they were bypassing rules that apply to most everyone else. The European Union closed its borders to tourists in March, when the COVID-19 pandemic gripped the continent.
Over the past several months, the E.U. has lifted restrictions for some countries, but not to travelers from the United States because of concerns that the U.S. has failed to bring its coronavirus outbreak under control.
But here is how Beyonce, Jay-Z, Johnson and Wilson apparently managed to get around the E.U. ban. The E.U. restrictions are merely advisory and not legally binding on its member nations. Croatia opted to take a more liberal approach and to welcome U.S. tourists as long as they could produce a negative COVID-19 test, the travel industry site Skift reported.
Croatia welcomed a total of 4.2 million foreign tourists in July and August, the nation’s ministry of tourism reported, according to Skift. The vast majority of these visitors were from other European countries. Only about 20,000 were from the United States, the tourism industry reported.
But there were consequences for Croatia becoming a hot destination this summer for Americans and tourists from other countries. The Eastern European nation saw an uptick in the number of COVID-19 cases after it was spared in the earlier wave of the pandemic, Skift reported.
The country saw a 174- percent increase in coronavirus cases in mid-August, according to the European Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The country’s chief epidemiologist told reporters that about two-thirds of the new cases in a single day could be attributed to people visiting night clubs and bars that stayed open after midnight, Reuters reported.
Several European countries also tightened their restrictions for travelers from Croatia, Reuters reported. For example, the United Kingdom has advised citizens to limit visits to Croatia to only “essential travel,” and Germany has said that people traveling from certain areas of Croatia, including the heavily-touristed Dubrovnik, need to quarantine for 14 days.
Meanwhile, the increase in cases prompted the U.S. State Department to issue an advisory in August, suggesting that citizens reconsider vacationing in Croatia. But perhaps American tourists can feel safe vacationing in Croatia if they can travel by yacht, like Beyonce and Jay-Z did, and limit their trips to shore.
