7 minute read
The Future of Travel
What Might the Post-Pandemic Travel World Look Like?
By John S. Hamalian
“I can’t wait to travel again!” is probably one of the most common refrains heard during the pandemic. We didn’t realize just how much we missed travel, with all of its many nuisances and small tortures, until it was gone. It seems that now we would jump at the chance to wait on long queues, to ensure our electronic devices are put in a separate bin and raise our arms up as if hardcore criminals. Such is human nature. So for now, while still largely hunkered and bunkered, what do we do? We lament, we dream, we save, we think and we plan. But plan for what? What might travel look like down the road?
In the short term, everything we have been getting used to — temperature checks, tracing check-ins, covid tests and the like — will likely remain for quite a while. But what about after that…beyond travel bubbles, safe corridors and green lanes. How will the social, economic, environmental and technological trends of our day influence the way we travel in the coming years? Here are a few possible scenarios to contemplate while we dream of future journeys.
Work From Beach
First, there was WFW (Work From Work) and now there is WFH (Work From Home) -- is WFV (Work From Vacation) next? A friend of mine from Portugal declared to me that he and his wife are planning a six-month trip to Asia next year. “That’s kind of a long time to be away from work,” I dubiously stated to him. “Oh, no,” was his immediate reply, “we will still be working, just not all the time.” He plans to work and play while traveling and sight-seeing. My friend’s work
entails activities such as running training courses, most of which are now online. He can easily do this while hanging out in Phuket, for example, and if his hostel is too “hostile” for online learning, he just needs to rent out some quiet space for a few days at a time.
The pandemic has shown us that a lot of work (though certainly not all) can be done remotely, and not only has technology provided us with the means to accomplish that but, perhaps more importantly, corporate and social norms are now making it largely permissible. Would a combination of work and vacation suit everyone? Probably not, as some may prefer a real break holiday break, but the option will be there.
Sustainable Travel
Throughout the pandemic, images of wildlife reclaiming dormant tourist spots and graphs of dramatic drops in CO2 levels have starkly reminded each of us of the footprint we leave on the planet every time we travel. Tourism is responsible for roughly eight per cent of the world’s carbon emissions, according to Sustainable Travel International, but also affects the purity of our world’s built and natural wonders. The recent momentum around climate change and air/land/sea pollution impact awareness is not going away and – if anything – may be enhanced by the growing realization that current human development patterns are unsustainable, possibly even creating the circumstances by which the virus came to us in the first place. Due to these realities, key aspects of how we travel are changing, some of it driven by demand (us and our travel choices), some of it by supply (recall that the an entire island of Boracay was shut down to tourists for half a year due to chronic pollution).
Sustainable Travel aims to preserve (and ideally even increase!) the enjoyment of traveling while minimizing negative and maximizing positive social-economic-environmental impacts of travel itself. It is centered around a few key elements, such as 1) Alternative means of transport that avoid air travel (how about taking an adventure on the Trans-Siberian Railway rather than a mundane flight from Moscow to Vladivostok?); 2) Avoiding Over-Tourism (so many of us have been to Bangkok, but how about the ancient Thai capital of Sukhothai?); and 3) Engaging in activities that support sustainability while traveling, which can range from simple actions like minimizing singleuse plastics to more comprehensive endeavors such as organized tours where participants can actually engage in sustainability activities (i.e., sign up to plant trees, help preserve local communities, or learn about endangered species while contributing to the NGOs that help protect them).
The second and third elements also tend to support another aspect of Sustainable Travel: helping reduce income inequality by promoting local economies in second and third tier tourist destinations. While there is nothing like chilling on a beach once in a while, all of these alternative activities sound like a heck of a more memorable (and meaningful) adventure than the typical “Hey, look at me with an umbrella drink” trips.
Physical/Digital Hybrid Routines
Many of the digital “everything online” habits we have developed during the pandemic, particularly in periods when we were in near or total lockdown, will likely linger for a long time. How will these new routines and patterns affect how we travel — before, during and after our trips? Pre-travel will probably leverage online research more than ever before, perhaps with a bigger focus on video tools. Will we use Virtual Reality (VR) to “test” a destination prior to buying those expensive tickets? Will we do a Zoom call with a local person to get to know a place beforehand? Travel itself could be supplanted by VR in an extreme scenario, especially to extremely remote or dangerous places, but more likely Augmented Reality may be used so people can easily navigate and explore their strange new worlds. More digital engagement with friends and family during rather than just after trips may also transpire (on-the-spot video calls to livestream your exotic meal instead of that boring slideshow to punish folks with upon your return). Post-trip, digital tools will make it even easier to share experiences and weigh in on pros and cons of tour companies, hotels and destinations themselves.
On a broader scale, how we define travel itself may transform in ways we cannot even imagine, a trend started by creative hybrid service offerings such as Medical Tourism. Aided by advanced technology, the walls of the traditional silos of Transport, Hospitality, F&B, Shopping, Healthcare, Wellness, Philanthropy and Workspaces may evaporate to the point where it will be difficult to see where one begins and the other ends, conceivably providing the ultimate in end-to-end travel experiences.
The Wild Card
The final element is perhaps the most debatable: just where will we go in the future? In a simplistic summation, the question comes down to a couple of main possibilities for the types of areas we will yearn to visit: hot spots or cold spots. There are two competing schools of thought on this. One holds that travelers will avoid hot spots, the places where majorities tend to flock to such as Rome or Hong Kong, because they want to decrease risk. The premise here is that the pandemic has programmed us to become averse to human contact, to limit proximity to one another, to loathe crowds. We will instead shift to cold spots, places under-traveled, and reembrace the forgotten joys of the expedition itself through free-wheeling travel and backpacking. “It will be the desire simply to go, and to figure things out along the journey,” says travel author Rolf Potts.
The other argument is that people will still prioritize travel to the well-established tourist spots, even outright avoiding “less developed” areas that have perceived deficiencies in basic services such as healthcare and cleanliness. However there may be caveats, as the list of hot spots might be narrower than before the pandemic, limited to countries and regions with a very strong reputation for excellent governance, orderliness and civic responsibility. International affairs expert James Crabtree predicts that “countries with strong pandemic records will deploy them as tourism marketing strategies.” Think Taiwan, Singapore and New Zealand. In this scenario, some previous hot spots that are deemed to be ‘risky’ may be demoted to warm spots.
Regardless of how any of these scenarios play out, one thing is certain: we shall dream, we shall plan, and we shall travel again. Whether by purposeful trek or meandering odyssey, on well-laid roads or paths less groomed, to familiar harbors or undiscovered countries; we will traverse, we will explore and we will responsibly partake of the many treasures that have been beautifully bestowed upon this good earth that we all share together.
John is a US citizen and an avid explorer with a passion for travel journalism and photography. He has visited more than 65 countries, including the entire Far East of Asia. He has written for The Straits Times, Shanghai Daily, The Armenian Mirror-Spectator, My Paper, The American Women’s Club of Korea and the in-flight magazine of Royal Bhutan Airlines.
