Superstar Esperanza Spalding will be highlighting this year’s Dominican Republic Jazz Festival, organizers announced this week.

The four-time Grammy-award-winning Spalding, one of the leading jazz artists today, will be joined by featured artists including Terri Lynne Carrington, the Patricia Zarate Quintet and the Big Band Conservatory of Santo Domingo, among others.

This year’s festival will be its 20th annual edition after first debuting in 1997; it will run Nov. 8-12.

The free event will include four days of concerts in Santo Domingo, Santiago, Puerto Plata and Cabarete, respectively. It will begin with a concert in Plaza España in the heart of Santo Domingo’s Colonial Zone.

VIP tickets are available, along with priority seating, complimentary beverages and other perks.

— CJ Staff

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Round Hill Hotel & Villas in Jamaica is offering guests the chance to begin the new year with a four-day, three-night holistic retreat, hosted by wellness coach Shayna Hiller, from January 19-22, 2017.

Hiller – a U.S.-based expert in the fields of nutrition, yoga and meditation, and author of Don’t Judge Me By My Cover – will guide guests through a practice of intention and goal-setting to reinvigorate those who want to improve their health for the coming year.

She will provide participants with methods for integrating mind, body and spirit, with the added bonus of a backdrop of Caribbean waters.

The retreat is designed to teach guests how to love their bodies, eliminate self-doubt and shame, manage stress, feel more confident, increase intimacy in their lives and lose excess weight.

For more information, visit Round Hill.

— Dana Niland, CJ Contributor

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Delta today reported a decline in unit revenues for September, amid strong operating performance and lower fall capacity levels.

Consolidated passenger revenue per available seat-mile declined three percent for the month year over year.

The airline attributed the dip to a continued supply-demand imbalance in the trans-Atlantic and headwinds from prior year Yen hedge gains in September.

The airline said pressures from close-in domestic yields moderated slightly in September with the implementation of its fall schedule.

Mainline completion factor – the percentage of flights that were not canceled – came in at 99.9 percent for the month, with preliminary data showing 90.2 percent of those flights arrived on time.

— Dana Niland

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Finding serene sleep at Anse Chastanet

By Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon, CJ Travel Editor

The centerpiece of my suite at St. Lucia’s Anse Chastanet resort is a four-poster bed. Draped in diaphanous netting and dressed in linens trimmed with the colorful traditional Madras plaid, it’s the stuff of which Caribbean dreams are made.

But I didn’t sleep there last night.

Instead, I found an even better spot to rest my head. And I’m guessing you would, too, if you had this oasis of a wraparound balcony to yourself.

Reclined on one of a pair of lounge chairs in its southern corner, I watched the sun set over the calm Caribbean, clouds refracting its golden glow and reflecting it onto the water. Framed by a hillside carpeted with the greenest of trees, the scene was like something out of a vintage Caribbean postcard.

And if I looked left across even more mirror-flat water, I saw the Pitons, St. Lucia’s twin volcanic peaks. Although miles away, they appeared so close I could reach out and touch them as they stood silent and majestic vigil over this captivating corner of the island.

As the sun descended and its amber glow was replaced by the blue-black of night, as stars peeped out as if from behind an inky scrim and the chorus of whistling tree frogs began its nightly performance, I could fathom no reason to move from this luckiest of spots.

So I simply reclined the backrest of my chaise a little further, lit the votive on the side table next to me, and settled in for the night. Because when life gives you an opportunity as sweet and serendipitous as this, the only smart thing to do is to seize it.

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SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Field Operations Officers on Sunday seized 22 pounds (9.9 Kilograms) of cocaine from a passenger arriving at the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport in San Juan from St Thomas, US Virgin Islands.

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