What kind of holidays will we take when we can travel again?

This must be a major question on the minds of most of us fellow travellers. What does the future of travel really look like? Will guided tours come back soon? Air travel? And what will the costs be?

There's no denying that the travel industry is taking the biggest hit we have ever seen. More than terrorism. More than natural disasters. Never before have we encountered this type of global shutdown. But where to from here?

I suspect that it will take a very long time for most businesses to recover from the effects of the pandemic. For example, how would you feel about going to a restaurant just now? Or a crowded bus, train or cinema? Well it would feel worse to me to be in a plane or a crowded airport. Not only would I have the same sort of concern about people too close to me, I'd also have the background memory of what a sudden outbreak of disease can do when you're overseas. That's because I experienced exactly that in March whilst in India. Fortunately, my timing was as lucky as I could get, with things closing down just after I'd visited them, and a need to rush home when I already was scheduled to anyway. But others have not been so lucky - some returned home on high-priced airfares, others got stranded. It is something that you don't forget.

I would not be surprised to see international air travel suffer for a terribly long time. There's a good chance that in the interim, arrival in your destination country will require you to be quarantined for a couple of weeks. Then when you return you may be quarantined in your home country for another couple of weeks. I cannot imagine too many people who will want to lose a month of their holiday time in lockdown. And worse if they have to pay for accommodation they cannot escape from. That spells trouble for tour operators, regional hotels and all the people employed in each segment of any guided tour package. Then there's the risk of being infected with Covid-19 whilst on a holiday. The overwhelming evidence shows that few people exhibit severe symptoms so 97% or so might be ok locked away in a hotel room for a couple of weeks - but is that any way to spend a holiday? Or if you're one of the severe cases, confined to a hospital and on oxygen? And I'll bet that those same travel insurers who already didn't cover pandemics, will write a CV-19 exclusion into their policies, leaving people with a huge medical bill.

No, I think overseas holidays might be a tad too risky for most people until they have immunity from the virus. That's only likely from two means: you caught the virus and you fought it off with antibodies that remain in your system; or you get vaccinated with remnants of the virus to trick your system to create those antibodies (like the flu jab). But we don't yet know enough about this virus or when a vaccine may be available for widespread use. Do antibodies protect a person from future viral attack (i.e. can you catch coronavirus a second time)? And would a vaccine even work? The virus is not the same as influenza; it's a SARS type of virus and we never invented a vaccine after that 2002 outbreak. And the common cold is also a virus and nobody has ever invented a vaccine for that either. Then there's the matter of viruses having a nasty pattern of morphing into new strains (influenza is a perfect example). While all this is definitely negative, human technology has always found a solution so not all is lost. But these things generally don't happen quickly.

So I am not optimistic that international holidays will resume for some time, and if so, domestic holidays will probably capture the tourism dollar in the interim. That's our plan as we own a modern caravan and would have been heading through Australia's outback interior next week had it not been for state border closures that lock down the highways. 

So is anybody else thinking of planning any type of holiday yet?