Holiday blues: “no one’s going anywhere”
There’s nothing like looking forward to a summer holiday, said Mark Palmer in the Daily Mail. The very thought of new surroundings and sunny skies sustains many of us through the chilly months. But the Covid-19 pandemic has put paid to all such plans for overseas travel. “This year, no one’s going anywhere.” Nearly 17,000 passenger jets – a large majority of the world’s total – are currently sitting idle on runways as a wave of mass layoffs and bankruptcies sweeps through the airlines. Meanwhile, “hotels, villas, holiday apartments, safari parks and all-inclusive beach resorts are shut, with no guarantee that they will open any time soon”. This is deeply frustrating for would-be travellers: Britons have shelled out an estimated £7bn on holidays they now won’t get to enjoy. But it’s also disastrous for the tourism industry – a sector that for the past five years has generated a fifth of the world’s new jobs.
It looks like crowded Mediterranean beaches are “a thing of the past”, said Peter Conradi in The Sunday Times. Greece insisted last week that it wanted to open its resorts to foreigners in July, but it’s hard to see how that could work. France plans to make foreign visitors go into quarantine for two weeks. The UK is considering making returning British travellers do the same. Asked whether Germans would be able to go abroad this summer, Chancellor Angela Merkel replied simply that the issue was “not on the agenda”. Let’s face it, said Tom Robbins in the FT: tourism as we know it is going to change. “Flying is almost certainly going to be more difficult, unpleasant and expensive.”
To restart air travel, we’re going to need a set of measures to protect passengers, said John Holland-Kaye, chief executive of Heathrow, in The Daily Telegraph. This could include health checks, surgical masks and “fantastic levels” of airport hygiene. Social distancing, however, is a non-starter, as there’s not enough room in terminals to spread people out. “Just one jumbo jet would require a queue a kilometre long.” One way or another, though, it’s essential that we do get aviation going again. It’s a “cornerstone of the UK economy”: about 40% of the country’s imports and exports travel on passenger planes to and from Heathrow. But for the sake of the planet, it is imperative that we do not return to business as normal, said George Monbiot in The Guardian. Even with all this disruption, global CO emissions are set to reduce by only about 5.5% this year, when the UN is urging cuts of 7.6% every year for the next decade. We have to accept that the days of mass air travel are over.