The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
There is change in the air for the way we travel
Cheaper city breaks and more space to play with on long-haul flights indicate possible upsides ahead, says Nick Trend
What are the long-term consequences of the pandemic for our holidays? Will it make them cheaper or more expensive? Will we have more choices, or fewer? How long will it take to get back to normal?
Having just finished today’s cover story about how we might best navigate the next few months, my eye was caught by a special report from The Economist on the future of travel over the next decade and more (economist. com/special-reports). It’s a big subject – much too big to cover in this column – but there were a couple of pointers and predictions, particularly concerning aviation, which address some of those questions.
First, recovery will be slow. After international arrivals fell by 70 to 75 per cent last year, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development thinks tourism will be among the last sectors of the economy to recover lost demand. Some forecasters predict it will be 2024 before aviation gets back to 2019 levels, with longhaul lagging well behind short-haul.
Second, business travel may never rebound. The Economist quotes Credit Suisse estimating that there will be 65 per cent fewer international business trips this year than in 2019. Bill Gates predicts a long-term shift: “Over 50 per cent of business travel… will go away,” he thinks. Others are less pessimistic, but it is worth remembering that after the financial crisis it took business travel five years to recover, but only two years for tourism.
This could have a big impact on the rest of us, especially for city breaks and long-haul flights. In 2019, a quarter of global spending on international and domestic travel was funded by businesses. That spending – especially in club class cabins – is vital to airlines, especially traditional carriers such as BA, Air France and Lufthansa. A rule of thumb, according to The Economist, is that “business class comprises 10 per cent of tickets, but 40 per cent of reve
nues and up to 80 per cent of profits.”
Those airlines may have to find a new model. Not many leisure travellers can afford business class, but demand for premium economy is strong. It seems likely we will see a reconfiguration of long-haul services, with fewer club class seats – perhaps sold more cheaply – and more in premium economy.
The short-haul sector is viewed as more resilient, being able to bounce back by offering low fares. City breaks could look attractive over the next couple of years, with lower air fares, fewer tourists and – at the top end – hotels forced to keep room rates low because fewer guests will be on expenses.
One thing I’ve found hard to fathom over the past year or so is the resilience of travel companies in the face of such an extraordinary crisis. As bookings have dried up and so much money has (for the most part) been returned to customers, there have been some failures, but far fewer than I expected. How are
so many operators and airlines managing to stay afloat? It’s a critical question because, if we do see failures, it will mean less choice and competition. Expertise will be lost, and prices will surely rise.
There have, of course, been many redundancies, which have reduced costs. Government grants, loans and furlough payments have helped, as have cash injections from shareholders and investors. And this is traditionally a resilient industry, used to fighting its way through crises (although one operator told me recently that, had some companies known how long this was all going to last, they would have closed their businesses last March and salvaged what assets they could).
But if travel doesn’t restart soon, some of that resilience may crack. So, if and when you do decide to commit to your next holiday, remember the mantra: book a package, protect your holiday, pay with a credit card.
Until relatively recently, I had a hard and fast rule that every year I would do one expedition that wasn’t to do with work and had to meet two requirements: it would involve my friends, and we would develop some skills. So in 2001, two of my best friends and I decided to go to Scotland in December. And we decided we wanted to test how self-sufficient we could be.
I’d been working at National Geographic since 1998 as its adventurerin-residence, and foraging hadn’t been a part of my life. My friends and I wanted to see how much food we could forage to sustain ourselves over the five-day trip, though we recognised that it would be tough, and that the weather was probably going to be harsh and hard.
After the long drive up to Arisaig, we hired sea kayaks. We took some supplies with us, including dehydrated food, wine and fresh bread, plus onions and garlic to fry up with the seafood we planned to forage for our first night out under the stars.
In reality, though, we spent the first night in a pub called The Old Forge in Inverie. It was said to be the most remote pub in the British Isles, so an investigation was a must. It was truly a joyous place, a beautiful old stone building at the water’s edge in a tiny village. We ordered seafood and ate like emperors.
The next day, we paddled to Knoydart. Our route was going to be over to Skye and then round to Rum and Eigg and back to Arisaig. By complete chance, we got days with clear, icy blue skies, sunshine and flat, calm seas with almost no wind.
We paddled for about eight hours a day. It was cold. When the wind gets up even a little bit out there, it cuts you to the bone. After we had finished paddling for the day, then came the next crucial task: finding a spot on a beach where we could set up camp. We had to make sure to camp above the highest high-tide mark, and were grateful to be sleeping on dry sand – a true luxury.
I’m never happier than when I’m in a really good wild campsite. It is a great way to be connected to nature. It was quite something to be sleeping out in Scotland and to be able to look up at the moon and see the stars crystal clear, though we didn’t get any Northern Lights, sadly. The wild swimming – though absolutely freezing – was such a great way to start the day, too.
One morning, we woke up and there was a fully antlered red deer stag just walking down the beach looking like The Monarch of the Glen. Over our heads, golden eagles swooped. At one point, an otter popped up at the end of my kayak. I thought for a moment he was going to climb into my boat, he was so inquisitive. Then he just went off and started foraging, munching crabs in front of us.
We also had a minke whale and her calf appear close to our boats. It was an arresting sight, paired with the visually dramatic backdrop of the small isles of Rum, Eigg and Skye and the Knoydart Peninsula. While we were paddling, we trailed lines behind our kayaks to catch mackerel and pollack. One day, after a good few hours, my friend suddenly capsized into the freezing cold water. When we got him back into the boat we looked for the culprits at large: two tiny mackerel. They had got on his line and the pull of those tiny creatures was enough to overbalance him and send him into the sea!
Another big part of the experience was finding firewood, and getting the fire lit on a deserted beach. Once the embers started to fade, we brushed them to the side of the fire and put in the limpets, cockles or whelks – whatever we had found that day – and ate them out of the shell. We wrapped up the mackerel in seaweed and cooked it the same way, in the embers of the fire. It tasted exquisite. And as anyone knows, after a long day’s paddling in cold temperature, everything tastes like gourmet cuisine.
Whenever you are on a holiday that involves some element of modern technology, you are, to a certain extent, inoculating yourself from the environment. But the more you completely involve yourself in it, the more you feel connected to the world around you.
Our simple aim was to see if it was possible to live on limpets and whelks and cockles and very definitely mussels (and fish that we’d caught). We wanted to see how much of it all we could find. And we were pleasantly surprised by our results. Although, to be honest, we were spoiled. Because it was the middle of winter, we had those isles completely to ourselves.
That holiday shaped the course of our trips for the next decade, each involving some element of foraging and living off the land. I think that whole experience showed me, in a very pure and very beautiful way, that you really can connect to an environment.