What will the ticket to ride be like now?
BY EVERY measure, the coronavirus pandemic has decimated the travel industry.
Images of the world’s shutdown are eerie, the numbers staggering. Approximately 100 million travel sector jobs, according to one global estimate, have been eliminated or will be. Passenger traffic on US airlines is down 95% compared with last year, while international passenger revenues are expected to decrease by more than $300 billion (R5.47 trillion).
Domestic hotel occupancy rates fell off a cliff and now hover around 25%.
Regions and countries are beginning to open up, but the outbreak will undoubtedly change how we think, act and travel, at least in the short term.
“The pandemic is going to fade slowly, with after-effects, a lot of which will be psychological,” said Frank Farley, a Temple University psychology professor and the former president of the American Psychological Association.
“There’s so much uncertainty that the average folk might want to know everything about travel,” he said. “What’s the escape hatch? What are the safety issues?”
Yet the desire to travel will not go away. In a recent survey by Skift Research, the research arm of the travel trade publication, one-third of Americans said they hope to travel within three months after restrictions are lifted.
Can airlines keep people apart and make a profit?
Solving physical distancing in aircraft – currently attempted by leaving middle seats open – and returning to profitability seem at odds without a medical solution to Covid-19. Nonetheless, expect airlines to dangle cheap fares to get people in the air. “There will be smoking-hot deals,” said RW Mann, an industry analyst and consultant.
Testing would go a long way in reassuring the public, of course, but so far only one airline, Dubaibased
Emirates, has offered virus tests to a limited number of passengers. Groups including pilots unions have called for temperature checks. The Transportation Security Administration hasn’t moved on the idea, but Air Canada plans to begin taking temperature readings at check-in this month, and Paine Field just north of Seattle recently installed a thermal camera that reads passengers’ temperatures before they enter security.
Passengers, beware: low fares won’t last. Assuming the virus puzzle is solved, many expect a robust recovery in 2022.
Could check-in actually get better?
Health screening, space-perpassenger ratios and a redesign of passenger flow are likely to change in the wake of Covid-19.
Puerto Rico’s Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport provides a window into the future of airport screenings. Its new thermal-imaging cameras screen arriving passengers, triggering an alarm when a temperature of 100.3 or higher is registered. Feverish passengers are taken aside for evaluation.
Space will be vital to ensure passengers aren’t in crowded security lines. Cellphone location data may cue your arrival to an airport, which can then check you in curbside and move you on to a security tunnel in which passengers continue moving – sci-fi style – as they are screened by health authorities.
Will passengers return to the seas?
Ships turned away from port after port, passengers quarantined in cabins, emergency workers in hazmat suits… few travel sectors have taken a harder hit than cruises, now largely halted per no-sail orders issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Carnival Corp, the biggest company, has said it could resume sailings on August 1.
Analysts believe large companies like Carnival and Royal Caribbean Cruises have the financial endurance to wait out a recovery until 2021.
But discounted fares and flexible cancellation policies will go only so far to reassure future passengers.
“The real challenge will be reducing perceived risk of actually getting on a ship, and this will require changes in operational practices,” said Robert Kwortnik, an associate professor in the hotel school at Cornell University.
He listed passenger health screenings and contingency plans for when infection occurs. In its order, the CDC directed the industry to take more responsibility for managing outbreaks on board, including plans for laboratory testing of samples, disinfection protocols and providing personal protective equipment.
Genting Cruise Lines, the
Hong Kong-based company that owns Crystal Cruises and several other lines, has already issued new standards, including banning self-service buffets, requiring temperature checks at embarkation and disembarkation, twice-daily temperature checks for crew members, and masks for housekeepers and food servers. It will also require a doctor’s note for passengers 70 and over, indicating they are fit to travel.
Ships, too, may be deployed differently, said Ross Klein, a sociologist at Memorial University in Newfoundland and a cruise-industry expert who, since 2002, has run Cruisejunkie.com. He foresees ships being stationed at islands in the Caribbean, rather than travelling port to port. “If there’s illness on board, you can walk off and fly home,” he said of this hotel-like model. “While at sea, you’re captive.”
What’s important to families now?
With roughly 1 in 5 workers out of a job and perhaps some belttightening among those who are still employed, affordability will become even more important for family travel.
“Health and safety will be top of travellers’ minds; it will change how families choose their destinations, and it will change how travel companies operate,” said Carolyne Doyon, the president and chief executive of Club Med North America and the Caribbean.
Will people gravitate to nature?
According to a survey of travellers by Destination Analysts, a tourism research and marketing firm, more than half of American travellers say they plan to avoid crowded destinations when they resume travelling.
That bodes well for parks, even if allowing travellers back in requires physical distancing modifications to close popular trails and overlooks,
Will travellers sign up with tour operators?
The logistical ease of group tours comes with a trade-off: travelling with strangers.
“I certainly appreciate the paradox: there is safety in numbers, there is risk in numbers,” said Jennifer Tombaugh, the president of Tauck, a high-end tour and cruise company. One solution, Tombaugh said, will be smaller groups with lower guest-to-guide ratios – a trend that had already been predicted to rise, pre-pandemic, by the US Tour Operators Association.
Debra Asberry, the founder and president of Women Travelling Together, which runs affordably priced small-group tours for women over 50, expects the national parks trips to rebound first, just as they did after 9/11.
“It really saved us in 2002, and we think the same thing’s going to happen here: We’ll have a much heavier emphasis on domestic tourists, especially into the first half of 2021,” Asberry said.
And over-tourism, an industrywide concern, has renewed importance. “Ten years ago, people wanted crowded markets and big, cities,” said Bruce Poon Tip, founder of G Adventures, a communitytourism-focused tour company.
“Now there’s a real push for tours in Antarctica, the Galápagos, Mongolia and Tibet – all wide-open spaces.” | The New York Times