These are strangely precarious and hopeful times. These are the big questions I have as travel is poised for a big recovery, even as some answers have emerged in the last year.
Before we know it, we will be two years into this coronavirus pandemic, two years through the toughest times the travel industry has ever faced in modern history.
In the naive and chaotic early days of the pandemic last year, we had so many questions about what shape the coming future of travel would take, so much so that I and the rest of the Skift editorial and research team banged out 114 questions on it, a lengthy list that we posted on April 27.
And as I wrote it then, “These are the questions whose answers one way or the other will define how travel moves on from here and what the coming future would look like. These broad lines of enquiry will define our coverage of the global travel recovery in coming months and years.”
Now, 18 months later, so many of these questions have indeed defined thousands of stories, dozens of research reports and tons of work on behalf of our industry partners that our various teams have worked on since then. Many of these 114 questions have been answered in definitive ways, some we are just beginning to see the contours of answers emerge, some of the questions seem silly in hindsights, and many we have no sense of the answers so far.
One of the clearest answers to have emerged during this phase is that travel is NOT a human right, as the industry leaders had been saying for the decade of hyper growth, and if it was, clearly is the first to go away. Every calamity, every conflict, every geopolitical issue impinges its own rules and travel, the free movement of humans is one of the first to be sacrificed. The hubris is gone, and what has emerged instead is travel is indeed a privilege we have to balance with the complex, intertwined lived realties of the planet.
What has also emerged in the rebound of travel in sporadic spurts in the last year — mostly domestic travel — is that travel is indeed a human need, that connection that is fostered through traveling and meeting people is indeed the default human condition. The desperation to travel speaks to the desperation of connection.
This is an excerpt from an article by Rafat Ali, originally published by Skift.
