How COVID-19 changed traveling
Vacation season is underway, but travelers are still cautious
It was a sunny week in March in the coastal town of Denmark, Australia, when Christi Sparrow and her family were faced with the question many travelers had to answer when the pandemic hit, “What should we do?”
Sparrow, her husband Jay and their two children, Chloe, 5, and Camden, 2, were a little more than halfway through a year-long trip around the world, a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to share with each other and on their Puddles and Passports website and social media channels. Since September, the Sparrows had traveled to Italy, Croatia, Germany, Thailand and Jay’s home country of England.
Now they were more than 10,000 miles away from the San Antonio home they rented out to help fund their journey.
Should they go back? That would mean Sparrow and the kids flying to Florida to stay at her father’s small condo, with Jay flying back to Texas alone to pick up their car and then drive 1,200 miles to reunite with them. But then what?
Ultimately, the Sparrows settled on staying in Australia, moving from Denmark to the Western Australia capitol of Perth, just before the country’s regional borders closed.
“Our grand travel plan is still kind of in motion, although it’s paused,” Sparrow said by phone.
As the coronavirus continues to cripple travel both foreign and domestic, avid travelers such as the Sparrows find themselves contemplating severely compromised trips or no travel at all. Call it cautious uncertainty during the Great Travel Depression.
Even as shutdown measures loosen, leisure travelers still face a summer vacation season of enhanced sanitary protocols and limited capacities at hotels, theme parks and other travel destinations. Assuming they even want to go.
“People are just kind of wary,” said Lindsey Duckworth, a San Antonio-based travel agent for A Time to Treasure Travel, which specializes in family vacations. “Add in the social unrest right now, and nobody’s booking trips to New Orleans or D.C. or any other city. People are putting the brakes on a lot of things.”
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Duckworth was booking anywhere from five to 15 trips a week. Then all went quiet in March, with April and May only seeing cancellations.
Duckworth just booked the first trip in months: a couple’s wedding anniversary in the Caribbean island of St. Lucia in April.
“Honestly, the business came to a screeching halt,” Duckworth said.
The tourism analysis company Tourism Economics found that national weekly travel spending in the U.S. for the week ending May 30 grew by 15 percent from the previous week to $4.3 billion, the most spent since March. Yet Tourism Economics noted domestic travel spending still remains severely depressed at about 20 percent of the average level seen in the weeks leading up to the pandemic.
But even with travel restrictions easing and more people booking trips around the country, Sandra
Llewellyn, owner of AJ Travel in San Antonio, said her new bookings have remained soft, while those who have booked for trips in July, August or September have taken a wait-and-see approach.
“People are going to be cautious until there’s a vaccine,” Llewellyn said.
Duckworth said about the only people who are traveling for leisure these days are the occasional millennials or frazzled parents with school-age children, so stir crazy from sheltering in place they’ll take anything to look forward to. But for the most part, travel buffs are staying put.
The Sparrows had to reschedule what would have been their next stops in New Zealand and Hawaii.
“Yeah, lots of on-the-fly adjustments,” Sparrow said. “But in the end, I think health and safety are most important. And beyond that we’re just glad to be all together as a family.”
Frequent traveler Rosalva Mendez would agree.
“I think just like everybody else we’re just kind of waiting to see what happens,” Mendez said.
Before the pandemic, Mendez, her husband and their daughters ages 10 and 14 traveled three to four times a year to Dallas, Chicago
and other domestic destinations, along with frequent weekend road trips to a home in Aransas Pass. Mendez and her husband also took an annual trip or two abroad, usually to Belize or some other beach destination.
But when the coronavirus started spreading around the world, the Mendez family canceled a summer trip to Jamaica.
“This was the first summer we were going to take our girls out of the country,” Mendez said. “It’s disappointing. (But) we understand how serious COVID-19 is.”
Mendez said her family wears face masks whenever they’re out and are cautious about being around too many people. They just don’t see themselves boarding an airplane, she said, hence limiting their getaways to just those weekend drives to the Texas coast.
“It’s not just flying,” she said. “It’s staying somewhere where you’re not really sure (what to expect).”
Which is why travel experts such as Duckworth and Llewellyn recommend vacationers either wait until they can enjoy a fullfledged vacation experience or take a trip now with a lot of compromises.
For example, Duckworth said Disney World recently reopened but took away its fireworks shows and meet-and-greets with Disney characters. And the Florida theme park is no longer taking reservations for 2020 due to capacity restrictions.
As for traveling abroad, better have that passport ready or renewed. Applying for a new passport now takes four to six to process instead of four to six weeks, Duckworth said. That means late fall at the earliest to get a passport if you apply now.
“It’s hard to look forward to something with such uncertainty,” Duckworth said.
One thing Duckworth is certain about: Travel destinations around the world have boosted their sanitation and safety protocols, with even the more luxurious places reexamining and reassuring visitors they’re not taking any chances.
Just the same, Llewellyn encourages consumers traveling outside the U.S. to take out travel insurance. And like Llewellyn, Duckworth also recommends doing due diligence by researching every stop on your travels before you head out.
Sparrow believes, though, that travelers still can make the most out of any trip, even with limitations. It just takes patience and creativity.
The Sparrows plan to spend the next couple of months exploring as much of Australia’s west coast as they can. Then if international borders open, they hope to make their way to New Zealand.
“One of the great gifts of travel is opening your mind, broadening your perspective and seeing how other people live,” Christi said. “It takes us out of our comfort zone, but it also opens our eyes.”
Not even a global pandemic can dampen that enthusiasm.