The Receding Horizon of Travel’s Return

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/travel/virus-travel-economic-recovery.html

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To work in the travel industry in 2020 is to live in a constant state of limbo.

When drug makers began announcing in November the promising results of vaccine trials, airline and cruise stock prices rallied, people around the world began planning and booking trips for 2021, and tourism workers — millions of whom had been out of work since the pandemic took hold — began to have hope.

“The vaccine news is a game changer from the consumer side of travel,” said Bryce Conway, founder of 10xTravel, a budget-travel website with some 70,000 members. “People see that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”

Yet, almost simultaneously, Europe and the United States saw the number of coronavirus deaths surge, with cases in record numbers, and tight lockdowns reinstituted in some places.

To many in the travel industry — like Sarah Keelon who lost her job as an onboard entertainer for Royal Caribbean Cruises over the summer, after being sequestered on a ship in the Caribbean for nearly two months — the whipsaw has become familiar. “Every day, I thought, ‘maybe something will happen today,’ because I was really hoping we’d be able to get back to work,” she said from her family home in Michigan, where she is now working two jobs. “But the C.D.C. kept saying we are pushing cruises back, over and over,” she said, referring to the agency’s “no sail” order which was extended three times. Though the order is now expired, cruising is not expected to restart anytime soon.

After a spring when travel came to a screeching halt, activity in Europe picked up during the summer, as did domestic travel in the United States. The industry hoped for recovery, but that optimism was dashed this fall by the latest round of lockdowns and quarantine restrictions. The heightened uncertainty continues to dampen the outlook for the months ahead, even with the positive reports of effective vaccines trials. The horizon for recovery, it seems, is ever-receding.

The coronavirus has killed more than 1.5 million people worldwide and nearly 300,000 in the United States, and has sickened millions more. While the first doses of a vaccine were administered this week in Britain, and other drug makers are readying their vaccines, the estimated timeline to manufacture, distribute and administer the vaccine broadly stretches into early summer 2021 — for the United States alone. And many think that timeline is ambitious.

For those who rely on tourism for survival, a mass return to travel by then might be too late.

In the United States, travel spending is expected to finish the year 45 percent down from 2019 levels. According to the latest figures released by the U.S. Travel Association, a trade group that promotes travel to and within the country, the industry will not return to its pre-pandemic levels until 2024.

According to the association, nearly 40 percent — 3.5 million — of all travel jobs have vanished. Another million are expected to disappear by year’s end without an additional round of government relief.

“A lot of businesses that need help to retain and rehire their people won’t be there in January if we wait until the next Congress to get more aid passed,” Roger Dow, the association’s chief executive, said last month. “The pain among travel employers is extremely acute, and so is the frustration that Washington has been unable to act so far given the size and obviousness of this problem.”

Many travel agencies have relied on reserves, loans and government support to get through the downturn. They fear that those resources will dry up before the industry bounces back.

“Everything changes so quickly, it’s been a constant scramble since March,” said Leigh Barnes, the chief customer officer for Intrepid Travel, a small-group tour company, which was forced to lay off 40 percent of its staff this year to stay afloat.

Only the inconsistency remains consistent.

Cheryl Grantham, owner and innkeeper of Casa Grandview Bed & Breakfast and Casa Grandview Vacation Rentals in West Palm Beach, Fla., said that at the start of the pandemic, she didn’t think the virus would have much impact on her business. But after the property was forced to close in March to adhere to state regulations, she realized it would be a hard year. The property was allowed to open for monthlong stays in August.

Since reopening, some people have been booking and canceling, but others have been coming and staying for longer periods of time. The mix of bookings and cancellations, Ms. Grantham said, makes it “impossible” for her to have any sense of when things might return to some kind of normal again.

“Some people have said, ‘see you after Covid’ and some have said we have to get out of the house because we haven’t been anywhere in six months, and they come down,” she said.

Ms. Grantham added that no one has canceled Christmas reservations yet, an indication to her that people are itching to get moving again soon.

The grim travel forecasts have been echoed in Europe, the top international destination for Americans after Canada and Mexico.

“We estimate that a third of the travel companies in Europe will disappear before the full restart of travel in 2022 or 2023,” said Eric Dresin, the Secretary General of the European Travel Agents’ and Tour Operators’ Association, an organization that represents travel professionals in the European Union and six other countries.

At the start of the year, Yuval Ben-Ami, a National Geographic tour guide based in southern France, was fully booked for excursions across five countries. Now, after months without any work, he wakes up every morning to busk in a local market.

“When your industry dies you have to ad-lib, you have to invent,” said Mr. Ben-Ami, who lives with his wife and 3-year-old daughter in Provence. “I bought an amplifier, a pluggable guitar, a microphone on a stand and I started busking.

“At the age of 44, I’m doing something I did when I was 21, which was more becoming then, but I have to say I’ve improved as a musician,” he said, laughing.

Others who rely on tourism as their livelihood, like Ms. Keelon, described feeling anxious and depressed because of the uncertainty around when, if ever, they would be able to go back to work.

In August, Ms. Keelon got a job doing clerical work at a hospital. A few weeks later she started her own business as a virtual assistant, helping people answer emails, run social media and handle other digital tasks.

“We have these lightning-rod moments where news breaks of vaccines and the lifting of travel restrictions and we see a significant surge in searches, but people are still cautious when it comes to booking,” said Mr. Barnes of Intrepid Travel’s online site traffic. “It will take time.”

On Nov. 10, a day after the drug maker Pfizer announced its vaccine was highly effective against the virus, Kayak, the travel search site, had a 27 percent increase in flight searches from the United States compared to the same day one week earlier, marking the site’s largest single-day, week-over-week increase since early July. As a search site, Kayak does not gather booking information.

Would-be fliers on Easyjet’s website went ahead with purchasing: Bookings rose by 50 percent on news of a vaccine. And the travel operator Atlas Obscura saw an uptick in bookings for its New Zealand and Russia’s Northern Lights trips for May and later in 2021.

In the United States, bookings increased by about 25 percent after the Pfizer news, according to Skyscanner, a travel search engine. But just two weeks later, airline bookings stalled as cases of the coronavirus rose.

Americans are now 58 percent less likely to travel over Christmas or New Year’s than they were just a few short weeks ago, according to data from Clearcover, an insurance start-up. The data, which was gathered by surveying more than 1,300 Americans, also found that 49 percent of people were planning to travel but canceled plans because of rising Covid-19 numbers; of those who are not planning to travel, 73 percent indicated that they would have traveled for Christmas or New Year’s if it weren’t for the virus.

Mr. Conway of 10x Travel said that he expects that people will be comfortable booking trips that start in the summer of 2021, and others in the industry agree that a return to some kind of normal won’t begin until then. And they estimate, like Mr. Dresin, that a full recovery won’t exist until 2022 or 2023.

Greg Antonelle, chief executive of Mickey Travels, a New Jersey-based travel agency that helps travelers plan Disney trips, said that when the pandemic started, some people were canceling trips with the hope of rebooking soon; others were booking new trips for later in 2020, not thinking they’d have to reschedule them.

In recent weeks, however, Mr. Antonelle said that anxious would-be travelers with previously booked trips have pushed those to next year. He expects them to travel when a vaccine is widely available.

“People, early on, seemed OK with the cancellations because they understood the severity of the pandemic,” Mr. Antonelle said. “They still understand the volatility of this pandemic, but many people who have been working remotely, home-schooling and in quarantine are really looking forward to traveling.”

Mr. Barnes of Intrepid expects travelers to keep booking shorter domestic trips closer to home over the next 18 months, but when confidence in international travel is restored, he said demand will return for expensive, international “bucket list” trips like seeing the Northern Lights, gorilla trekking in Rwanda and climbing Mount Everest.

Across Africa, where the tourism industry was the second-fastest growing in the world before the pandemic, there is little domestic tourism to offset the loss of international dollars until those bucket-list travelers arrive. Worries are also emerging that uncertain timing of the vaccine distribution there — expected to come months after a rollout in other regions — will hamper the industry’s rebound.

“These mass vaccinations we have been hearing about will first come to the U.S. and Europe,” said George Gituku, the owner of Sandrage Safaris in Kenya. “By the time they come to Africa it will be a while, and this wait will be very challenging for all of us in the safari and travel business.”

COVAX, an international program set up by the World Health Organization, and the public-private health partnership Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance are raising funds to insure distribution of the vaccines to developing countries. They aim to prevent a repeat of 2010, when African countries received the swine flu vaccine a year after the West.

For short-term survival, Sandrage and other safari companies have rescheduled bookings into 2021, but tour operators worry that many of the hotels and lodges, which were reserved using customer deposits, will not be able to hold out for that long.

“Most lodges have been shut down since March with no income, and those who reopened for domestic travelers are struggling to meet their operational costs,” Mr. Gituku said. “Even when they are closed, they need security and maintenance, which they are paying with the very little reserves left from our clients’ deposit payments.”

If some of the lodges close down, they most likely will be unable to reimburse him for the deposits he has made.

If that happens, Mr. Gituku says he will have to prepare to absorb up to 50 percent of his client’s losses by paying the deposits for the new lodges out of his own pocket.

Additionally, the necessary infrastructure to keep and deliver the vaccine to everyone might not be available everywhere.

“Many of these vaccines require storage in very cold temperatures and many parts of Africa do not have the infrastructure for this,” said Patrick Barasa, who runs several safari lodges across Kenya and Rwanda. “It will take a lot of time to organize and distribute, and that means more time without any business. Next year will be very dicey.”

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