Preparing for the return of tourism
When restrictions began to lift in July 2020, the company went back to offering staycations. It has arranged about 850 staycations and the future is beginning to look brighter.
"Domestic and foreign staycation bookings have picked up a great deal since February 2021 and we are also starting to receive requests for overseas trips for travel in 2022," Tan said. "This is a huge contrast to 12 months ago－I would say there has been a more than a 100 percent increase."
The company is starting to see requests for trips to places with more relaxed quarantine measures such as Maldives, Sri Lanka and Dubai.
"We've most certainly observed an upward trend based on the number of requests we have received in the last five to six weeks," Tan said. "The big question is how quickly things will bounce back, with vaccination plans being rolled out at different rates across the globe. It is a given with most of our clients that they will not travel before being vaccinated."
The entire global industry is pinning its hopes on the billions of people around the world that are eager to travel. If that pent-up demand is freed up, the super-boom the industry needs to recover could come to pass.
But it is unclear when full-scale travel will again happen. A lot of things have to line up first, including vaccinations, some kind of harmonization regarding testing and government regulations.
The World Travel and Tourism Council is optimistic that a rebound is near, particularly as countries open up. Greece, for example, is set to begin opening up on May 14 and the United Kingdom on May 17.
A recent survey in the UK found people planning to spend a big portion of extra savings accumulated during the lockdowns on a personal expense or a trip. Another survey, done in Canada by Mainstreet Research for iPolitics, a Canadian news website, found that 56 percent of Canadians would travel internationally within a year of the pandemic and 81 percent would do so after a year.
The International Air Travel Association, or IATA, is piloting a travel pass that would allow travelers to manage health credentials on mobile devices. The first traveler using the pass arrived in London on a Singapore Airlines flight on March 18. The European Union is working on its own vaccine passport, hoping to have it in place before the summer and the United States is also considering COVID-19 health credentials.
The World Health Organization has established a Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group to find ways to align all the different vaccines available around the world. The 10-country Association of Southeast Asian Nations is considering a common digital vaccine certificate.
