Planning a trip always had a lot of moving parts – coordinating vacation time, finding airfare that won’t break the bank and selecting a resort or destination that you both will enjoy. All that changed in early 2020 with the advent of the Coronavirus.
We’ve been through a lot in the span of time since this started. Travel bans, vaccine and testing requirements to enter various countries, requirements to return to the United States.
All that has added complexity, but if you really like to travel and see the world, these things are mostly manageable. On the flip side, many employers have shifted job requirements to allow for work at home or hybrid options that make taking a trip together a bit easier to plan and execute.
Our take is that on balance, this too shall pass. We will find new ways to venture out of our houses and the handshake that we wouldn’t have thought twice about a couple of years ago, will be replaced with a fist or elbow bump. Masks will be visible in public places, much as they have been in Asian countries since the SARS outbreak in 2002.
Airlines and travel providers have worked to put infrastructure in place to allow you to know what the testing requirements are for a particular destination. On a recent trip out of the United States, our hotel had recommendations and literature from a testing provider that was ten minutes away. We took the tests, had the results emailed to us later that day and were good to go for our return flights to the US. It gets a little more complicated if you have a positive COVID test result abroad, so think through how that might work for you, but it’s not nearly the deal breaker that it would have been a year or two ago.
It’s clear that travel dollars support a **lot** of jobs in the travel sector, so the sooner people start safely traveling, the sooner that people’s livelihood in the travel sector will return, which is a good thing for the overall economy. Our view is that there is an itching to get back to travel and a lot of pent up demand waiting.
Where does that leave people clamoring for a vacation after too much time cooped up indoors? Well, for one, travel deals will start to become apparent. Airlines, hotel properties and resorts will be trying to attract guests to fill their seats and rooms. Lowering prices is a time honored tradition to boost business and we’re likely to see some of the most competitive pricing on vacation products we’ve seen in a very long time. That means that you’ll generally pay less and/or get much more value on upgraded travel than you would have in say, 2019.
Aside from price though, companies in the travel industry have altered their policies and procedures to help people feel more comfortable – more visible disinfection procedures, more touch-less processes for interacting and changes to policies that don’t penalize you for changes in travel plans.
Couples travel to hotels and resorts will be one category of travel that should bounce back sooner than others because it’s smaller scale. It will be a longer recovery for larger scale conventions, both because people will need to become comfortable in large group settings again and any sort of large convention has a significant lead time to plan, enroll attendees and execute.
Long story short, if you’re interested in travel, we will be seeing some great opportunities over the next yea. If you’re in a position to be able to take advantage of them, this can be a great time to see more of the world.
So, lets travel!
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