Business establishments on island sustained no major damage during Supertyphoon Chaba, Saipan Chamber of Commerce president Alex Sablan said yesterday.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of flooding but most businesses are okay. Some warehouses were damaged but can be easily repaired. I don\u2019t believe it hurt that much,\u201d said Sablan.<\/p>\n
In fact, he said the typhoon conditions resulted in increased consumer spending since people bought stock items.<\/p>\n
Hotel Association of Northern Mariana Islands president Ron Sablan, meantime, confirmed that hotel occupancy was up during the typhoon.<\/p>\n
He said local residents with no power and water supply at home preferred to check-in at hotels.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlso people went to hotels for security reasons,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n
Tourists who got stranded on island due to the stormy condition also boosted the occupancy rate over the weekend.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was good for the hotels. We we\u2019re glad that we can be of help but it\u2019s unfortunate because of its impact on tourism,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
Ron Sablan said that, while there was some benefit in terms of increased occupancy rate, \u201cwe\u2019re concerned about how the island looks right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThat certainly affects tourism but we\u2019ve been resilient on this kind of situation. We can work things out together,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Meantime, Sablan said HANMI\u2019s coordination with the Emergency Management Office in getting timely weather alerts \u201cworked\u201d this time.<\/p>\n
He said that during Typhoon Tingting, HANMI was at a loss for lack of information from EMO.<\/p>\n
\u201cShortly before Supertyphoon Chaba hit us, we had worked things out with EMO. For the first time, EMO was giving us information on [the] weather situation. It\u2019s effective. We were able to give our guests timely updates,\u201d said Sablan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Business establishments on island sustained no major damage during Supertyphoon Chaba, Saipan Chamber of Commerce president Alex Sablan said yesterday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}