Most of us are getting used to seeing faces without masks as we fill up graduation ceremony venues or stroll through the Micronesia Mall. We don’t have to show our vaccine cards when we head into restaurants, music festivals are returning with vibrant crowds and COVID-19 restrictions are, for the moment, fading in the rearview mirror as we forge past pandemic protocols.

Thankfully, life as we once knew it at the start of 2020 slowly is returning, with cautious optimism in play.

And as we welcome this long-awaited return to a more familiar sense of pre-pandemic normalcy, we can shift some of our focus from containing COVID-19 to revitalizing our economy and strengthening island businesses.

That’s what a new group of local businesses and industry leaders are doing. On Tuesday, members of the newly formed Guam Travel and Tourism Association formally announced its initiatives.“We’ve seen the uptick when we saw visitors coming in from Korea last week and previously when flights started to come back,” said Monte Mesa, general manager of Tumon Sands and Guam Premier Outlets, at the organization’s press conference. “We’re very concerned and interested in charting our journey in bringing back our visitors and we’re tracking this very closely to ensure that all our tenants remain in business.”Described as an evolution of the group “Protehi I Lina’Lata,” which formed last year in an effort to advocate for more government support for local businesses struggling with the pandemic, the Guam Travel and Tourism Association will focus on supporting businesses that aren’t members of other formal organizations.“We needed to figure out how to help them, particularly those businesses who weren’t members of the Chamber or GHRA, who were suffering and part of the tourism infrastructure,” said David Tydingco, CEO and managing director for Valley of the Latte Adventure Park.We commend the leaders of the Guam Travel and Tourism Association for their forward thinking. All businesses need this kind of support as we work to revitalize Guam’s economy.