Category: Travel Written by: Daqeeq Date: 21 Jun 2021
Daqeeq says….
Travel as we know it will be different this year
Travel, for known reasons, is mostly associated with summer, unless you want to ski.
Summer is at the door, but for the second year, the world is hit with Coronavirus, which brought about changes in travel as we know it.
The good news is that the world, despite the bad news in some areas, like India, is going through a slow recovery process, thanks to vaccines, which will play the lead role in deciding how travel will look like for the rest of the year and months to follow.
The world may remember 2021 as the year of recovery and boom. It is human nature to have a reaction to the circumstances people go under. Psychologically, the human being tends to balance things by going to the other extreme. So, after these lockdowns and restrictions, people naturally tend to leave home and go somewhere else where they can act freely and move without restrictions.
The first trend, as mentioned above, is that would-be travelers cannot be allowed entry into countries and places without vaccination certificates.
With a third wave expected in many places, especially where the vaccination rollout is slow, choices will be limited. As this lagging in the immunization process is happening particularly in the third world, there will be limited movement from and into these places, leaving individuals and groups with limited choices. Richer countries are likely to be more prepared to receive tourists.
In addition, experts expect that some trends might be accentuated, such as therapeutic and wellness tourism, and spiritual and religious travel.
Tourism scholar Dr. Fabio Carbone from Coventry University says in a recent research paper that tourism this year will be more about people than destinations and places.
He said the tourism sector “will have to rethink tourist activity, tourism planning, management and destination development based on a new humanism that would consider the ‘human factor’ more than it has done so far.”
He says there is an opportunity “to recover and reinvigorate the idea of tourism as a vehicle for human development, intercultural dialogue, and sustained peace. A human centre tourism, Tourism 5.0.”
However, what stakeholders agree on is that, in all cases, travel will look a little different in the foreseen future than it did pre-pandemic.
And many also agree that there is an opportunity for adaptation and innovation on the part of tour operators and tourism services providers, taking into consideration that travelers will for a long time be concerned with health considerations.
Travelers’ habits will, for the same reason, change. Mingling with the crowds in night markets, for example, will not be advisable. The same applies to visiting popular, usually crowded, restaurants in downtown areas in cities across the world. Travers will have to make memories in other places such as trails in nature and cottages on remote warm shores, where social distances are more under control. Birdwatching is another healthy choice, so is traveling in small groups rather than a crowd boarding one bus.
No comments yet.