Welcome to What’s Next For Travel ~ Conde Nast Traveler

1 ~~~ Welcome to What’s Next For Travel ~ Conde Nast Traveler ~~~

This summer, I’m sure you’ve all been feeling the snowballing strangeness of not being able to travel in the way you’d like to. I know I have. This was weird when the calendar turned to spring; now it’s doubly so. I can only imagine how we’re all going to feel when the days turn cool again and we all start thinking about the holiday trips we will or will not be taking this year. To be sure, these are unprecedented times for travelers—because these are unprecedented times for human beings. But let’s be honest: While we’ve never experienced anything like COVID-19 before, anyone who likes to explore the world understands how global events impact travelers’ decisions every day. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve certainly felt that in the early 21st century there seem to be more and more global events impacting travel decisions—and that’s what this newsletter is all about.

This might sound rather dire, especially if you’re thinking about travel in a time of COVID, but it’s also at the root of what I love about travel. Travel is connected to everything else we care about: nature and culture, food and clothing, language and cities, and above all people. Things that happen to people are things that affect travel. We often tend to think of the global events that impact travelers in terms of calamities. Before COVID, there were the Australian bushfires (which were raging earlier this year, if you can believe it), and the fires in the Amazon and the Western U.S. and Canada before that; there was the devastation of Hurricane Dorian on the Bahamas, and of the 2017 hurricane season on multiple places, notably Puerto Rico. Besides extreme weather, and the related—and ubiquitous—challenge of climate change, there are the shifting sands of politics and economics, which have consequences for how travelers view countries from Myanmar to these United States.

www.cntraveler.com/story/welcome-to-whats-next-for-travel ~ 24 August 2020 ~