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I keep reading these very carefully considered pieces on *how travel will change* post-pandemic. Some of them are really good. The main points: travel will become more introspective, slower, more thoughtful.
People will think of the environment when they travel, and take greater care to be culturally responsible.
First of all, the articulation of these shifts happened prior to the pandemic. For one example Maria Shollenbarger wrote about slow luxury as the future of high-end travel in December 2019 in @FT @htsi. https://www.ft.com/content/ee4362c0-7091-420d-be27-7ea7d012337e
This is an elite project, if it is a project at all. This conversation is of interest to frequent travellers, basically the upper crust & a small number of nomadic travellers who are not rich.
(And it should, be right? The people doing the most travelling should, in a general way, be more responsible.)
Most people don’t have four weeks per year to wander, so whether they would spend that time in one place, rooted in a local circular economy or gallivanting around doesn’t really enter the frame.
And of course frequent fliers are reconsidering their travels! They have been travelling too much. Business travellers and people in travel media simply got on planes too often in the years leading up to the pandemic. The reconsideration is welcome.
(I feel zero envy for the way I chased frequent flier status over the past decade. It’s not an approach I plan to replicate once COVID-19 is tamed.)
But I am not representative of most travellers. Few in travel media are. Most people who travel for leisure take holidays once or maybe twice a year. A major recalibration isn’t necessarily in the cards for them – nor would they necessarily be able to afford one.
These slow immersive travel experiences do not come cheap!
Most people want their vacations back. Their concerns right now are about being able to afford holidays & being able to navigate those holidays safely.
Until they can afford them & do them safely, I expect we’ll see a continuation of the sorts of holidays that boomed in various places in 2020: camping, house rentals, RVing, roadtrips, outdoor experiences. But I suspect these are stopgap measures, not long-term reorientations.
External, pandemic-related limitations – temporary or otherwise – would continue to slow things down of course.
Will people be able to travel once they have received their vaccines, no questions asked, or will they be compelled to take PCR tests & quarantine for 10 days upon arrival? Will specific routes relaunch too slowly to match up w/ volume? Will some routes be terminated altogether?
Maybe there are bigger cultural shifts that will prompt them to travel differently in time, but right now these seem really far off.
I might be wrong! I wouldn't mind being wrong.
But at the very least we should not be confusing elite strategies & solutions to overtourism among people who have been crisscrossing the globe for decades for approaches applicable to the vast majority of leisure travellers.
OK. One more thought. COVID-19 seems to have been the thing that got elite travellers to rethink how they travel. This is, as above, a good thing.
But for most people it has absolutely not performed this service. It has been an impediment to leisure, a fraught set of constraints and dangers to navigate.
(Or to wait until things get easier to navigate!) But in any case, a matter of loss or scarcity & not an opportunity to recalibrate one's travel philosophy.
