It's been a relatively quiet hurricane season for the U.S., but busier in the Caribbean and Mexico. Still, though prepared for the worst as storms approached, the resorts in those areas got off very easy.

On August 18 it looked as if Hurricane Dean, an extremely powerful Category 5 storm with sustained winds of more than 150 mph, would give Jamaica a direct hit and proceed to smash Cancun, which was devastated by Hurricane Wilma in 2005. But Dean veered south, and Jamaica’s tourism infrastructure suffered only minor damage. The same was true on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, where the heart of the storm passed well south of Cancun and Cozumel on August 21.

On the Pacific side of Mexico, Hurricane Henriette crept up the coast during the first week of September, dumping torrents of rain on Acapulco, where residential areas were flooded but the area’s resorts were unscathed. The resort area of Los Cabos on the southern tip of the Baja Peninsula took a direct hit from Henriette September 4, but the hurricane topped out at Category 1 strength, with sustained winds of no more than 80 mph. The resorts never closed and suffered little damage other than some fallen palm trees.

On the same day Henriette got to Los Cabos, the very powerful, Category 5 Hurricane Felix made landfall near the border of Nicaragua and Honduras, an area of mostly small villages. The storm weakened quickly as it moved inland, and though more than 20 inches of rain fell in the capitals of both countries, there, too, major resorts were spared significant damage.