There’s hope: Summer vacations abroad may happen in a big way this year.
The number of people busting out of their countries will start creeping up this spring and rise higher by mid-year, travel industry experts predict, as vaccines and risk-based safety measures are rolled out more widely and spiking coronavirus cases around the world begin to fall once again.
“I’m actually quite confident that first of May onwards … we’ll all be in a much better world,” said Paul Charles, founder and CEO of London-based travel consultancy The PC Agency.
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Vaccines and testing are the way forward, Charles and other industry experts say, but what’s needed perhaps as desperately is greater consistency and coordination across borders.
“When you don’t have a coordinated global approach, it’s very difficult for the industry to go forward, especially when you have the rules of the game changing basically every single day,” said Luis Felipe de Oliveira, director general of Airports Council International (ACI), a global trade organization representing the world’s airports.
There’s a lot more work to be done in ironing out testing protocols that would allow globetrotters to opt out of quarantines and finding ways to smoothly and securely share vaccination and testing information across borders.
Sovereign nations still decide what’s best for them individually, looking at their own health situations and economies, but progress has been made in getting countries to look more globally at the huge economic force that is travel.
An alphabet soup of agencies, organizations and companies (UNWTO, ICAO, ACI, WTTC, the airlines and so on) have collaborated on numerous sets of guidelines and global recommendations aimed at making travel safer, easier and less confusing for a world of consumers starving for a change of scene.
ACI’s de Oliveira says that the summer rebound could mean international air traffic reaching 50% to 60% of previous levels in most countries.
Here are some of the hurdles travelers and the industry will need to get over as travel picks up:
Eliminating quarantines
Mandatory — and shifting — quarantine requirements “basically are killing the process to restart the industry,” de Oliveira said.
When he spoke to CNN Travel, de Oliveira was on day 12 of a 14-day quarantine in Montreal after returning home from a business trip to the Dominican Republic followed by a personal trip to Mexico. He has quarantined four times in the past seven months, spending 56 days at home without the possibility of going out.
