It was promoted as a New Year’s Eve celebration in Cancun, Mexico — a six-night trip that included parties with open bars and a day exploring Tulum, a popular tourist destination in the Yucatán Peninsula known for its ancient ruins and the turquoise water of its beaches.
It would begin with a privately chartered plane from Montreal where the guests — a coterie of Canadian social media influencers, reality television personalities and others — would be entertained by a DJ on the flight to Mexico.
But the trip has turned into a fiasco, with airlines shunning the group and stranding many of its members and the Canadian authorities vowing to investigate after videos of the passengers surfaced on social media showing them flouting Canada’s Covid-19 curbs.
In the videos, the passengers are seen dancing and jumping in the aisles, yelling without masks on and passing around bottles of alcohol. One woman can be seen vaping in the cabin. Another passenger, his mask hanging under his chin, yells at his fellow travelers over the cabin intercom to sit down, and then, “to keep the energy up”.
“Let’s hear some noise, welcome to 111 Private Club!” the same passenger says in a video, referring to an online group described as “invitation only” that was founded by James William Awad, a musician and self-described entrepreneur who organised the trip. The passengers, many of them without masks on, yell back in approval.
About 27 of the 130 passengers on the flight are back in Canada, the country’s health minister, Jean-Yves Duclos, told reporters on Friday. “They were all stopped and interrogated at the border,” he said, adding that they were tested for Covid-19 and asked about their proof of vaccination.
New York Times News Service