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SKIFT - LESSONS FOR TRAVEL AND TOURISM ONE YEAR INTO PANDEMIC

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SKIFT - LESSONS FOR TRAVEL AND TOURISM ONE YEAR INTO PANDEMIC

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For our Viewpoint series, Skift invites thought leaders, some from the less obvious corners of travel, to join in the conversation. We know that these independent voices are important to the dialogue within the industry. Our guest columnists will identify and shape what global trends and through lines will define the future of travel.
One year ago this week, on March 11, something happened that quickly changed the face of travel as we know it:

"The WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction. We have therefore made the assessment that COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic."

A single phrase stood out then, and stands out now: "the alarming levels of inaction."

In the spirit of looking back and pressing ahead, I've analyzed 10 Shared Learnings for Travel & Tourism from the dark 12 months that we've all just experienced.

No-one was Prepared. "Pandemic" is a scary word, made more sinister by the fact that we only previously encountered its impact by watching disaster movies. Governments and corporates that read the pre-COVID-19 real-life risk reports placed them back in a drawer. The travel sector paid no attention to the potential destruction that a pandemic would inflict. It's easy to say this now, but it was also easy to assume that a pandemic would not occur "in our lifetime." There will be no excuse in the future. The likelihood of a future pandemic is scarily real. The world must build this into all economic, social, and healthcare framework planning.

Vaccines ARE/AREN'T the Only Tool in the Box. The travel industry - aware that vaccine rollouts in many countries will take most of 2021 - wants unified international collaboration on pre-/post-flight testing to open up the skies. Governments, which for the last year kept most borders closed on the premise that it is unsafe to unlock them until vaccines are administered, find it difficult to shift their overall stance on testing. It was far easier to lock down nations than it is proving to reopen them. This is a tough circle to square. A universal - or at least, in phase 1, a regional - vaccine passport (or Digital Health Pass) is vital, though. Can the EU and/or ASEAN take a lead?

"Governments, which for the last year kept borders closed on the premise that it is unsafe to unlock them until vaccines are administered, find it difficult to shift their overall stance on testing."

Islands are in the House Seat. Island locations are likely to dominate the early-phase reopening roster in Asia Pacific. Free of border constraints, isolated from land-locked populations and with their own infrastructures and (fragile) ecosystems, islands are desirable and manageable destinations in the current era. Maldives reopened successfully in July, and is preparing to greet vaccinated visitors. Sri Lanka is open, Seychelles will open on March 25. Indonesia's Bali and Bintan may not be too far behind. Thailand's economic strife means it has little option but to plan for reopening its islands. Malaysia may follow with Langkawi. The Philippines has a panoply of choices.Land borders present bigger problems for governments. Controlling restricted people flows will be particularly tricky in Southeast Asia, where some borders are notoriously porous. Over recent months, COVID-19 outbreaks in countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam were blamed on illegal border crossings. Conversely, both Malaysia and Singapore would enjoy an economic uplift from restoring their causeway crossing. Border management will present perhaps the toughest challenge for policymakers over the next 6-12 months.

"Border management will present perhaps the toughest challenge for policymakers over the next 6-12 months."

The Quest for "Comeback Markets." Two recent case studies highly the importance of securing connectivity with comeback markets. Bali attempted to reopen last September but was stymied by Indonesia's COVID-19 infection rate and widespread outbound travel bans in its key source markets. Reopening is one thing; ensuring people are able to visit is another. Maldives reopened successfully last July, and has attracted travelers from European and Middle Eastern markets, India and Russia - but not yet, of course, China. Over the past seven months, Maldives benefited significantly from competitor destinations being closed. That will change over the coming months - and competition will intensify to attract travelers from major outbound markets - and yes, China, is the most coveted. In Southeast Asia, outbound and inbound travel are mostly prohibited right now, but that will change. Once one nation makes a reopening play, a "rolling stone" knock-on effect will ripple through the region. The 10 countries of ASEAN will battle intently to entice tourists from each other - as well as China, India, Japan, South Korea, Middle East, Russia, Europe, U.S. et al. Governments have tracked each other's inactivity on border reopening over the past year, and they do not want to be left behind once the travel action begins to reactivate.

"In a new world of hyper-experiential travel expectations, travelers will want to be indulged and pampered, not categorized and counted."

Within the context of rebuilding comeback travel, annual volume setting is a mindset that must change. Arbitrary arrivals targets will add counter-productive pressures on travel firms that are slowly reforming and rebuilding. Moreover, travel consumers are ever-more unlikely to accept be branded in statistical terms. In a new world of hyper-experiential travel expectations, travelers will want to be indulged and pampered, not categorized and counted.

DON'T Ditch Domestic. The enforced pandemic-era shifting of the inbound-outbound-domestic travel equation is up for revision. Governments and tourism boards have implored citizens to travel and spend at home almost as part of a national duty to support toiling economies. And while domestic destinations and in-situ businesses have responded with creative promotions and tailored offerings, tour operators and travel agencies have struggled. Domestic trip choices and spending priorities differ to inbound visitors. They just do.Home-grown travel has gained a broader platform, and this should be nurtured and developed. This week, Tourism Australia revamped its Holiday Here This Year domestic travel campaign, and a n ew survey in Vietnam emphasized that "Safe & Nearby" (and short-stay) may remain a guiding travel mantra in 2021.
"We are calling on Australians to help support their fellow Australians by booking a city escape, which in turn will help to support the thousands of city-based hotels, restaurants, bars, cultural attractions and experiences that rely on tourism for their livelihoods."

Phillipa Harrison, Managing Director, Tourism Australia

Everyone is Rethinking the "Meaning of Travel." The travel sector often focuses on supply and demand, travel providers and travelers - them and us. Even in the pre-COVID era of putative "personalization," this endured. Too much loose talk was committed to "owning the customer." No more. Travelers will dictate terms. COVID-19 has united everyone who travels or is involved with the business of travel to take stock of our human vulnerability, personal wellbeing and our taken-for-granted mobility. Consumers understand the post-pandemic sacrifices they may need to make, and expect travel providers to do likewise. Adapting to this capricious quest for meaning will define the travel industry's immediate future.

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10 Shared Learnings for Travel & Tourism's Inbox One Year Into the Pandemic

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One year ago this week, on March 11, 2020, something happened to quickly change the face of travel as we know it. In the spirit of looking back and pressing ahead, Gary Bowerman analyzes 10 Shared Learnings for Travel & Tourism from the dark 12 months that we've all just experienced.

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Urgest role for tourism spearheading green recovery in Europe

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An alliance of more than 60 travel and tourism organisations is calling for the sector to be "firmly anchored" in national recovery plans across the European Union.

The European Tourism Manifesto group has launched a #Tourism4Recovery campaign to support its call and showcase the impact of investments in sustainable tourism.

It recently published a paper, entitled 'Call for Action: Accelerate Social and Economic Recovery by Investing in Sustainable Tourism Development', saying there is an "unprecedented opportunity to reset travel in Europe and build a more sustainable, resilient and innovative tourism sector".

The paper outlines ideas such as the development of clean fuels; investments in tourism marketing; rapid broadband services for rural, coastal and mountainous areas; and digital skills training for tourism workers.

Eduardo Santander, chairman of the European Tourism Manifesto alliance and chief executive of the European Travel Commission, said: "With appropriate support, travel and tourism can be one of the most effective engines to deliver sustainable development in 2021 and beyond.

"The sector supports employment across all areas and demographics, contributes to social inclusion and wellbeing and generates revenue needed to preserve community identity, culture, and heritage.

"We urge EU governments to follow our call and firmly anchor tourism and travel in their crisis response and recovery plan."

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Tourism group urges EU leaders to include sector in recovery plans | Travel Weekly

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An alliance of more than 60 travel and tourism organisations is calling for the sector to be "firmly anchored" in national recovery plans across the European Union. The European Tourism Manifesto group has launched a #Tourism4Recovery campaign to support its call and showcase the impact of investments in sustainable tourism.

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Visit Britain partners with WTTC

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UK businesses which are part of the 'We're Good To Go' scheme will automitically be issued with the 'Safe Travels' stamp after a tie-up between VisitBritain and the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC).

The We're Good To Go scheme, launched last year by VisitEngland in partnership with the tourism boards of Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, has been recognised by the WTTC as meeting its international global standardised health and hygiene protocols.

The WTTC stamp enables travellers to recognise destinations around the world which have adopted global standardised protocols - so they can experience 'Safe Travels.'

VisitBritain is coordinating the Safe Travels stamp issue in the UK, on behalf of the WTTC, for businesses registered to the We're Good To Go scheme, with those who welcome international visitors particularly encouraged to apply.

The 44,000 We're Good To Go registered businesses in the UK can log into their online account to download the Safe Travels stamp from today.

Any business not already part of We're Good To Go can apply to the scheme through the usual process and indicate their wish to use the additional global WTTC stamp.

VisitBritain chief executive Sally Balcombe said: "We are delighted that businesses certified to We're Good To Go can also automatically register for the WTTC's global Safe Travels stamp, recognising the standard of protocols and processes we have in place in the UK. This is also testament to the hard work and commitment of tens of thousands of businesses right across the country who have adapted and innovated to safely meet new ways of working and are already 'good to go'.

"This international stamp sitting alongside our We're Good To Go mark also serves to reinforce that 'ring of confidence' for visitors that UK tourism businesses, attractions and destinations have clear processes in place to welcome them back safely as travel restrictions are lifted.

"Our priority is to support the industry through crisis to recovery and beyond and this is a timely boost for businesses as well as for future inbound visitors, reassuring them that they can plan their trips to the UK with confidence, once we can travel again, and have a great experience when they get here."

WTTC president and chief executive, Gloria Guevara, added: "The globally recognised stamp enables both business and leisure travellers to distinguish destinations around the world which have adopted health and hygiene global standardised protocols - so they can experience 'Safe Travels', and VisitBritain's adoption will help to restore consumer confidence."

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VisitBritain's 'We're Good to Go' partners with WTTC's 'Safe Travels' | Travel Weekly

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UK businesses which are part of the 'We're Good To Go' scheme will automitically be issued with the 'Safe Travels' stamp after a tie-up between VisitBritain and the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC).

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WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION EXPRESSES OPPOSITION TO VACCINE PASSPORTS AT THE MOMENT

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WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION EXPRESSES OPPOSITION TO VACCINE PASSPORTS AT THE MOMENT

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5th March 2021

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There is increasing momentum behind demands for vaccination certification for travellers, but international agreement is required on the standards and use of certification - and the World Health Organization remains opposed for now.

The WHO published a position paper on 'Proof of Covid-19 vaccination for international travellers' on February 5 which made clear: "National authorities should not introduce requirements of proof of Covid-19 vaccination for international travel as a condition for departure or entry, given there are still critical unknowns regarding the efficacy of vaccination in reducing transmission.

"People who are vaccinated should not be exempt from complying with other travel risk-reduction measures."

It also warned: "Preferential vaccination of travellers could result in inadequate supplies of vaccines for priority populations."

The WHO noted these recommendations are "temporary" but in line with the advice of the International Health Regulations (IHR) emergency committee on Covid-19 issued in January, which is due to be reviewed in three months.

For now, the WHO said: "A number of scientific unknowns remain concerning the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines." These include "the efficacy of vaccination in limiting transmission including for variants", the "duration of protection", the "timing of booster vaccine doses", and how long before travel vaccination should be required.

Some of these 'unknowns' may be resolved relatively quickly. But the WHO also noted: "There is limited access to Covid-19 vaccinesworldwide, particularly in low-income and lower middle-income countries."

It warned: "Introducing a requirement of vaccination as a condition for travel has the potential to hinder equitable global access to a limited vaccine supply and would be unlikely to maximise the benefits of vaccination for individual societies and overall global health."

The organisation also highlighted a legal issue, noting that the 196 countries signed up to the WHO's International Health Regulations "are expected to abide by stipulations concerning the introduction of a proof of vaccination for international travellers".

Under the IHRs, "yellow fever is currently the only disease for which countries can require proof of vaccination for international travellers".

"Should the requirement of proof of Covid-19 vaccination for international travellers be introduced in future . . . vaccines must be universally available."

This does not mean vaccination certification won't become one way to facilitate travel. But the barriers may take longer to surmount than some media reports suggest. These include the technical issues. The WHO notes: "Vaccination status can easily be captured via digital means, [but] the ability to uniquely identify an individual and validate vaccination status requires international cooperation, orchestration across complex systems and widespread adoption of open interoperability standards to support secure data access or exchange.

"A digital vaccination certificate will additionally have to support the needs of national immunisation programmes."

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Covid certification faces health and legal barriers | Travel Weekly

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There is increasing momentum behind demands for vaccination certification for travellers, but international agreement is required on the standards and use of certification - and the World Health Organization remains opposed for now.

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The world's second largest hotel company stalled at the end of 2020 in its pandemic recovery, but company leaders say they used the crisis as an opportunity to position the business for higher earnings and lower labor costs in the future.

Hilton reported a $720 million loss for the entirety of 2020, with $225 million of that coming from the fourth quarter. That's a setback for the company, which saw an $81 million loss in the prior quarter and had company leaders believing at the time they were on their way to a breakeven point.

While Hilton leaders recognize the fiscal headwind, they remain confident cost-savings measures instated earlier in the pandemic as well as ongoing labor efficiencies position the company for better gains on the other side of the crisis.

"The positive momentum in demand we saw through the summer and early fall was disrupted in November and December by rising Covid cases, tightening travel restrictions, and further hotel suspensions - particularly in Europe," Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta said Wednesday on an investor call. "We remain optimistic that accelerating vaccine distribution will lead to easing government restrictions and unlock pent-up travel demand."

A winter surge of new cases around the world hindered the hospitality industry, especially in markets enacting new rounds of tough lockdowns and travel restrictions like Europe and northern China. "Modest" increases in demand in the U.S. offset some of the stalled recoveries in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, Nassetta said.

Vaccine distribution is picking up around the world, especially in markets like the U.S. and UK, but Hilton's optimism on future growth involves more than people getting inoculated.

Hilton significantly cut costs and looked for efficiencies across all brands when travel demand tanked worldwide last March. The company's general and administrative expenses are down about 30 percent, said Kevin Jacobs, Hilton's chief financial officer.

"I know it's sort of an odd time to be pounding the table with optimism, but when we sit around the table, it's been a hard year but, as a result of it, we've put ourselves in the best position because of it," Nassetta said. "The business is going to be better for it and produce higher margins and free cashflow, which is going to allow us to return even more capital than we were pre-Covid to our shareholders."

Rising Wages and the Pandemic Recovery

One area where costs have the potential to rise stem around labor, as there is a growing national movement to increase the minimum wage to $15 per hour. Nassetta voiced his support for the wage increase, if done in a multi-year phased approach.

"I think we should all assume the minimum wage is going to be going up over time because it needs to," he added. "I am hopeful it will be done in a staged way and there will be other mechanisms built into the timing and geographical approach to make it make sense on all sides."

But Nassetta also noted a rapid increase to the minimum wage had the potential to further impede the hotel industry's jobs recovery from the pandemic. Hospitality remains a laggard relative to the rest of the economy, and hotel unemployment in January was 23.1 percent compared to the 6.3 percent national average.

Rising wages don't necessarily mean higher costs to hotel owners, either.

While Hilton has found savings in many areas, some of that came at the expense of labor. Along with laying off roughly 22 percent of its global corporate staff last year, Hilton has also worked to find labor efficiencies in divisions like housekeeping and food and beverage at the property level.

Both Nassetta and Jacobs touted these labor efficiencies at Hilton brands like Tru as ways owners could be well-positioned to afford higher individual wages.

"When we get out of the crisis, those businesses will be higher margin and require less labor than they did pre-Covid," Nassetta said.

A Return to Normal

Most hotel companies continue to shy away from specific revenue forecasts given the ongoing uncertainty with the pandemic, but Hilton is optimistic over the second half of 2021. The rate of vaccine distribution in the U.S. is picking up where it could be possible to see significantly relaxed travel restrictions in a matter of months.

"The trend line there will be quite good when you get the all-clear sign, which hopefully will be by spring and no later than summer," Nassetta said.

Before China's flare-up of new cases, Hilton's portfolio there was running only about 10 percent shy of pre-pandemic performance levels, he added. The higher personal savings rate in the U.S. during the crisis also gives the company reason to expect an explosion of pent-up leisure travel once more people get vaccinated this year.

Hilton's group bookings inquiries were up 35 percent in January from the fourth quarter, and the company - like most of its competitors - sees a generally robust calendar of group reservations in the latter part of this year. The strong interest even has Nassetta cautioning employees to not heavily discount event space in 2022, as he expects overwhelming demand.

"I think there's a great opportunity for the second half of the year to be better than any of us think," he added.

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Hilton Walloped by $720 Million 2020 Loss That Pushes Hotel Giant to Permanent Cost Cuts

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The world's second largest hotel company stalled at the end of 2020 in its pandemic recovery, but company leaders say they used the crisis as an opportunity to position the business for higher earnings and lower labor costs in the future.

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Government and hotel chains struggle to agree contracts as hotels fear loss of revenue when demand increases in the summer.

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Government negotiations with hotels about quarantine arrivals have reached a "major sticking point", say reports.

Not a single firm has yet agreed to sign a contract to host the travellers, when a new quarantine requirement for arrivals from 33 Covid hotspots starts next Monday (February 15).

The Telegraph reports that ministers want to reserve 28,000 hotel rooms at 10 airports and ports.

More: Health secretary insists rollout of stricter border measures 'on track'
Calls grow for tighter restrictions on UK arrivals
The newspaper said: "The government is seeking to requisition the accommodation on an exclusive basis for an initial 45-day period until March 31 but expects the hotels to extend on a rolling basis beyond that point, with the daily rate capped at between £50 and £80 for a room and three meals a day."

A source close to the talks told the Telegraph: "The government wants an open-ended approach, but the hotels are not prepared to do that unless they compensate them for the income they would get from bookings for July and August.

"The government is not prepared to do that so there is a major sticking point over the financing of the whole thing. Why would you sign up for that when you could get your normal summer rates?"

Ministers need to resolve the wrangle by the weekend if they are to launch the scheme on February 15 as planned, said the report.

It is understood that the Department of Health department is prioritising hotels within two miles of Heathrow, with Accor, IHG and Hilton involved in the discussions.

More: Health secretary insists rollout of stricter border measures 'on track'
Calls grow for tighter restrictions on UK arrivals
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Hotels and government 'wrangle' over quarantine contracts | Travel Weekly

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Government negotiations with hotels about quarantine arrivals have reached a "major sticking point", say reports. Not a single firm has yet agreed to sign a contract to host the travellers, when a new quarantine requirement for arrivals from 33 Covid hotspots starts next Monday (February 15).

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Covid resources

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"This crisis is an opportunity to rethink the tourism sector and its contribution to the people and planet; an opportunity to build back better towards a more sustainable, inclusive and resilient tourism sector that ensure the benefits of tourism are enjoyed widely and fairly."

Zurab Pololikashvili,
UNWTO Secretary-General

The most comprehensive tourism dashboard to date, the Tracker is the result of a partnership between international organizations and the private sector. Available for free.

The UNWTO Tourism Data Dashboard - provides statistics and insights on key indicators for inbound and outbound tourism at the global, regional and national levels.

The UNWTO World Tourism Barometer monitors short-term tourism trends on a regular basis to provide global tourism stakeholders with up-to-date analysis.
COVID-19 and Tourism · 2020: a year in Review
With the support of the United Nations Statistics Division, UNWTO has launched the initiative Towards a Statistical Framework for MST.

We are facing an unprecedented global health crisis, the repercussions of which are being felt in all sectors of society and the economy. Health institutions and governments worldwide are doing their utmost to combat COVID-19

The UNWTO Global Tourism Crisis Committee endorsed UNWTO's Global Guidelines to Restart Tourism, an action plan focused on the Priorities for Tourism Recovery.

Work together to build a tourism sector that works for everyone, where sustainability and innovation are part of everything we do.

Zurab Pololikashvili, UNWTO Secretary-General
Executive Council - 112th session

For people, planet and prosperity

Boost tourism's recovery with

In collaboration with WHO

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Tourism and COVID-19: Leading Tourism Recovery | UNWTO

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"This crisis is an opportunity to rethink the tourism sector and its contribution to the people and planet; an opportunity to build back better towards a more sustainable, inclusive and resilient tourism sector that ensure the benefits of tourism are enjoyed widely and fairly."

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Information hubs

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To support the Travel & Tourism sector, we have created information hubs to help us all through this difficult time.

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'Travel industry could see an 80% decline in international arrivals for 2020 amid crisis that threatens livelihood of up to 120 million people'

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International tourism faces its worst crisis since records began, with up to 1.1bn fewer people taking trips globally in 2020. The scale of the coronavirus pandemic's impact is outlined in a report by the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), which predicts a decline in international arrivals of between 58% and 80% this year.

This is due to widespread travel restrictions and the closure of airports and borders worldwide. The prediction of a 58% decline is based on the gradual reopening of international borders and easing of travel restrictions in early July; the 80% figure is based on early December.

Globally, the crisis threatens the livelihood of up to 120 million people who directly rely on tourism for work - and millions more indirectly - while representing a financial loss in export revenues from tourism of between £736bn and £971bn. The predictions are based on UNWTO figures for the first three months of this year, which show a worldwide decline in international arrivals of 22%. Following the start of the lockdown in many countries, arrivals dropped by 57% for March alone.

The whole cycle of tourism is being wiped out by the pandemic

Gloria Guevara, CEO, World Travel and Tourism Council

"The world is facing an unprecedented health and economic crisis," Zurab Pololikashvili, UNWTO secretary general said. "Tourism has been hit hard, with millions of jobs at risk in one of the most labour-intensive sectors of the economy."

The figures are in line with the World Travel and Tourism Council's (WTTC) predictions of more than 100m job losses in the travel and tourism sector, with three quarters of these in G20 countries.

"This is a staggering and deeply worrying change in such a short time," said Gloria Guevara, CEO of WTTC. "In just April alone, our research shows an increase of 25m in the number of job losses in travel and tourism. The whole cycle of tourism is being wiped out by the pandemic. Travel and tourism is the backbone of the global economy. Without it, global economies will struggle to recover in any meaningful way and hundreds of millions of people will suffer enormous financial and mental damage for years to come."

The impact will vary in different regions at different times, with Asia and the Pacific expected to rebound first. According to the UNWTO Panel of Experts survey, some recovery is expected in the final quarter of 2020 and into early 2021, while domestic tourism is expected to recover faster than the demand for international travel.

In the UK, Visit Britain has forecast a decline in inbound tourist numbers of 54% for 2020, which equates to 21.9m fewer arrivals and a loss of £15.1bn in tourist revenue. This scenario assumes a recovery of international arrivals from August, and is subject to revision as the situation develops. In terms of domestic tourism in the UK, if the sector starts to open up in June, the annual loss will be an estimated £22.1bn (£14.1bn from day trips and £7.9bn from overnights).

Global airline revenues are forecast to drop by more than half - $314bn (£249bn) - in 2020, according to the latest estimates by the International Air Transport Association's (Iata). This is almost three times worse than its "worst-case scenario" in March.

Last month, the WTTC outlined what the "new normal" could look like as lockdown rules and travel restrictions are eased, pre-vaccine. New protocols and standards are being mapped out in collaboration with various associations - among them the UNWTO, the World Health Organization, European Travel Commission, and Iata - including global hygiene standards and intensive cleaning regimes in hotels, aircraft and cruise ships.
Topics

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World tourism faces worst crisis since records began, says UNWTO

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International tourism faces its worst crisis since records began, with up to 1.1bn fewer people taking trips globally in 2020. The scale of the coronavirus pandemic's impact is outlined in a report by the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), which predicts a decline in international arrivals of between 58% and 80% this year.

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Freya Higgins-Desbiolles (2020) Socialising tourism for social and ecological justice after COVID-19, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2020.1757748

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Abstract

Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2019-2020 has the potential to transform the tourism industry as well as the context in which it operates. This global crisis in which travel, tourism, hospitality and events have been shut down in many parts of the world, provides an opportunity to uncover the possibilities in this historic transformative moment. A critical tourism analysis of these events briefly uncovers the ways in which tourism has supported neoliberal injustices and exploitation. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis may offer a rare and invaluable opportunity to rethink and reset tourism toward a better pathway for the future. 'Responsible' approaches to tourism alone, however, will not offer sufficient capacity to enable such a reset. Instead, such a vision requires a community-centred tourism framework that redefines and reorients tourism based on the rights and interests of local communities and local peoples. Theoretically, such an approach includes a way tourism could be 'socialised' by being recentred on the public good. This is essential for tourism to be made accountable to social and ecological limits of the planet.

摘要

2019-2020年的新型冠状病毒肺炎（COVID-19）疫情有可能改变旅游业及其运营环境。这场使得全世界许多地方的旅游、旅行、接待和事件活动都被迫停止的全球危机, 提供了一个在这历史性变革时刻发现各种可能性的机会。对这些情况的批判性旅游学分析简要地揭示了旅游业对新自由主义下的不公正和剥削的支持方式。新冠（COVID-19）疫情危机提供了一个难能可贵的契机, 让大家可以进行反思, 让旅游业重新走上更好的、面向未来的发展路径。然而, 仅有"负责任"旅游方式这一种途径还不能为实现这种调整提供足够的能力。相反, 这种愿景需要以社区为中心的旅游框架, 即根据当地社区和当地人民的权益来对旅游业进行重新的定义和定位。理论上, 这个框架包括了通过重新关注旅游的公益性而使其实现"社会化"的方式。对于让旅游业承担起对地球社会和生态极限的责任而言, 这是至关重要的。

Keywords: COVID-19, responsible tourism, critical tourism, social tourism, social justice, public good tourism, cruiseship industry

关键词: 新型冠状病毒, 负责任旅游, 批判性旅游, 社会旅游, 社会正义, 公益性旅游, 邮轮业

Introduction

The arrival of COVID-19 has been viewed as a watershed moment. In terms of tourism, the unthinkable has happened. While previously the industry was grappling with concerns of overtourism, we suddenly have been catapulted into a collapse of the entire sector. This is because the tourism, hospitality and events sectors have been crippled by government efforts to curtail and control the pandemic. Borders have been shut, travel has been banned, social activities have been curtailed, and people have been told to stay in their homes. In undertaking these actions, governments around the world are trying to strike a balance between keeping their economy going and preventing dangerous levels of unemployment and deprivation, while trying to respond to dire public health imperatives that are necessary to prevent collapse of health systems and mass deaths. In such difficult circumstances, it is clear that one era is passing, but it is too early to identify what will emerge. In a world where growing inequality has led to massive numbers of vulnerable populations, it is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic and actions to address its spread are impacting these vulnerable communities in disproportionate and deadly fashion (see, for instance, Evelyn, 2020; Kazmin, 2020 ).

While it might seem that the concerns of tourism are of secondary importance in the middle of such a global crisis, this may not necessarily be true due to the significant role tourism has come to play in the economic growth and development plans of many nations. International and domestic tourism have been effectively shut down as unfortunate casualties of the crisis. The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO, 2020a) claimed 'ours has been the sector hardest hit by the crisis' and has proposed an agenda for recovery. The rising unemployment, the economic damage and instability, and the unprecedented size of government interventions to address the economic crisis all point to travel, tourism and hospitality being pillars of many economies around the world.

Tourism and its affiliated industries have experienced numerous crises before, including the 2005 tsunami in the Indian Ocean region, the impacts of the '9/11′ terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001 and previous pandemics such as the 2009 swine flu crisis. These experiences have seen the development of toolkits of risk management, risk mitigation and crisis recovery (e.g. Lynch, 2004) as well as a recent focus on resilience (Hall et al., 2018). However, the COVID-19 pandemic is of a much higher magnitude than previous crises because of its global scale and the widespread shutdown of travel, businesses and life activities.

It is predictable that industries such as tourism will be keen to get back to business as usual and are seeking shares of government stimulus packages and interventions. For example, one of the world's largest tourism multinational companies, Tui, is seeking aid from both the UK and German governments and has indicated it is slashing costs in its global operations (Hancock, 2020). Airlines around the world are presenting themselves as facets of critical transport infrastructures and also seeking government bailouts and packages. Qantas Airlines in Australia is one example that has been heavily criticized for harsh cuts to its staff while seeking government aid despite record profits in past years (Butler, 2020). An Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report noted: 'The industry is now focussed on ensuring business continuity despite the crisis' (OECD, 2020, p. 6). The question this raises is: what balance will be struck between supporting tourism multinationals, tourism small business, vulnerable tourism workers and destination communities in an environment that challenges the very foundations of current economic systems?

Despite such efforts to enable a return to 'business as usual' as soon as possible, some have identified this as a transformational moment opening up possibilities for resetting tourism. The UNWTO has seized on this rhetoric:

Tourism has the potential to recover and once again establish itself as a key part of national economies and of the wider sustainable development agenda.

This crisis may also offer a unique opportunity to shape the sector to ensure it not only grows but it grows better, with inclusivity, sustainability and responsibility prioritized. Furthermore, to build for the future, special attention should be placed on building resilience and on promoting sustainability at all levels (UNWTO, 2020b, p. 33).

We should be critically aware of the purposes of such rhetoric from an industry that has resisted substantial change despite widespread criticism and even protests and unrest (Cassinger, 2019; Higgins-Desbiolles, 2008). This analysis addresses the problem of tourism in neoliberal contexts and offers a case study of the cruise tourism sector to illustrate how this results in ecological and social injustices. Following thinking that the crisis offers an opportunity to reset tourism, this article reveals the false promise of 'responsible' tourism solutions. Instead, this work builds on recent analysis of redefining and reorienting tourism and offers new insights for rethinking tourism by 'socialising' it. Such efforts are important in this moment when possibilities for transformative change are made possible through the pandemic's disruption to business as usual.

Methods

This work is a conceptual analysis that draws on the theory, methods and insights of critical tourism epistemologies. At such a moment as this, critical tourism approaches are vital. Tribe argued 'critical research is essential for setting an agenda for ethical management, governance and coexistence with the wider world' (Tribe, 2008, p. 245). Despite his influential leadership in the tourism academy and the expansion of critical, responsible and transformative approaches to tourism in both the academy and without, we are in fact little closer to placing tourism in a context of sustainable, ethical and just coexistence with the wider world. Before the COVID-19 induced shutdown, the relentless drive for growth, profits and expansion were evident in most parts of the world; overtourism was one well noted symptom (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2018b; Jover & Díaz-Parra, 2020). A critical question to consider is what opportunities does the COVID-19 interruption of business as usual offer to us to rethink tourism?

In her book on Anti-crisis, Roitman noted that Marin Luther King had planned a speech titled 'Normalcy-Never Again' for his Lincoln Memorial Speech of 28 August 1963 (Roitman, 2014, p. 1). He amended the speech at the last minute to the 'I have a dream' theme we have come to know well. This decision to emphasise the more positive narrative has inspired many in the decades that have followed. But from a critical perspective, the demand for 'normalcy-never again' may have had the emancipatory, anti-oppression and justice focus that was required to address profound injustices against the Black American community in that moment of civil rights action and continuing to this day (see Evelyn, 2020). This article draws inspiration from these words 'normalcy-never again' to make a key point that approaches of 'responsible tourism' that are increasingly being touted in this moment will not be sufficient to create the fundamental changes that are required to reorient tourism away from the injustices and oppressions it currently enacts and supports.

Roitman studied crisis narratives in her Anti-crisis work, arguing: '[...] Crisis is mobilized in narrative constructions to mark out or to designate "moments of truth"; it is taken to be a means to access historical truth, and even a means to think "history" itself' (Roitman, 2014, p.3). This article uses the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to search out the truth about tourism and to ask what is revealed in this history-making moment of crisis for travel and tourism. The taken as given notions of tourism as an industry (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2006), the push for commodification of peoples and places through tourism (e.g. Kirtsoglou & Theodossopoulos, 2004), the privatisation of commons for profit-making in tourism and the transformation of communities into destinations (Higgins-Desbiolles et al., 2019) are all now open to thoughtful rethinking. Using the anti-oppression and pro-justice theorisation of critical tourism approaches, we can not only sharpen the critique of the moment we find ourselves in but also imagine radical and emancipatory solutions.

The revelatory power of the COVID-19 crisis: neoliberalism undone

The revelatory power of this crisis is enormous. Ideas that are rocked by this pandemic and responses to it include:

that globalisation is an unstoppable force;

that we cannot unlink from the logics of continuous economic growth;

that consumerism is the key to expressing our identity; and

that neoliberal capitalism is the best system for organising and allocating resources.

Neoliberalism from the 1980s has promoted: reducing government roles and regulations; increasing marketisation and privatization; reducing tax on the wealthy and big businesses; a consumer-based ideology; and radical individualism (Harvey, 2007). As a result of this system, workers' rights and conditions have deteriorated, environmental protection regulations have been attacked, and social safety nets have been reduced or abandoned in many nations (Monbiot, 2016). Importantly, a key outcome from neoliberal transformations is the attempt to diminish society in favour of the economy; as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one of the founders of neoliberal politics, once exclaimed 'there is no such thing as society'¹ (2013).

Accompanying this has been an ideology that 'there is no alternative' (TINA), such that opposition and protests have been often sidelined (Flanders, 2013). It is neoliberalism that has hollowed out societies and their resources, especially healthcare systems, making the pandemic even harder to address. The experience of the COVID-19 crisis has revealed that neoliberalism has embedded market values in social and welfare institutions that should have been dedicated to meeting the needs of people and society.

This crisis has also revealed the falsehood of TINA as neoliberal governments around the world are having to abandon their ideological positions. In response to the pandemic, these governments are: redeveloping social safety nets; calling on social solidarity in the action to get everyone to stay at home in the attempt to reduce COVID-19 transmission; and printing money and spending taxpayer funds in enormous amounts to maintain economic and social stability. With this crisis, we also can identify whose labour is needed to perpetuate society's wellbeing: the undervalued caring labour of nurses, grocery store workers, aged care, teachers, and gig economy delivery staff - many of whom are women and/or People of Colour.² It is neither the 'captains of industry' nor the celebrities that are seeing us through this crisis.

This also matters to the question of whether we return to neoliberal normalcy after the crisis passes, because these workers have been subject to poor pay and conditions, wage theft, job precarity and/or redundancy in the relentless drive to reduce costs and increase profits for the privatised entities that employ them. It is clear that profound change has been possible because of the unique challenges of this globalised crisis and it suggests that a systemic change is underway. Perhaps underscoring the way COVID-19 has caused a break with neoliberalism, the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the 30th March 2020 stated that 'there really is such a thing as society' in a message released while suffering with Covid-19 himself (Johnson, 2020).

An illustrative case study: the cruise tourism industry exposed

This article will take the example of the cruise ship as iconic of the conduct of neoliberalism and its failures in terms of human, social, economic and environmental well-being. In fact, the iconic image of the global COVID-19 pandemic and its abrupt shutdown of our hyper-mobile world have been those stranded cruise ships, full of passengers desperate to disembark and destination communities less than keen to receive them (see Cdanowicz, 2020).

The Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) positions its membership in terms of 'responsibility': 'CLIA cruise lines are leaders and innovators in responsible tourism and offer the best way for travelers to experience the world' (CLIA, n.2020d.) However, many cruise ships sail under a 'Flag of Convenience' (FOC), which does not suggest a commitment to responsibility. FOC describes when some cruise companies register their ships in a country other than the country of ownership. Common FOC nations include Malta, Bermuda, Panama and the Bahamas. Cruise companies choose to use a FOC as part of their economic model, helping their business gain profits by helping them avoid stringent economic, social and environmental regulations (see Tourism Concern, 2016). The practice of using FOC makes the cruise tourism sector emblematic of neoliberal forms of tourism. As Segnini and Rojas ( 2015) demonstrated in an analysis of the American cruise sector: 'The multi-billion dollar cruise industry is one of the least regulated in the United States, and is shielded under the laws of the tax havens from which it operates.'

In March 2020, when the cruise sector sought access to the $2 trillion USD stimulus plan funds being rolled out in the USA to deal with the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, these unjust and unsustainable practices were highlighted by opponents. Marcie Keever, Oceans and Vessels Program Director at Friends of the Earth stated:

The cruise ship industry should not be rewarded for polluting our oceans, breaking laws, harming communities and mistreating workers. Congress must hold the cruise industry accountable for its past abuses and not provide them a single dime before the American people are secure. We must make people and the environment the priority during this health crisis, not cruise industry profits (Friends of the Earth, 2020).

Cruise tourism has also been identified as one culprit in the overtourism crisis in places such as Venice, Barcelona and Dubrovnik (Street, 2019). In this COVID-19 crisis, the health and safety of the thousands of workers trapped on the cruise ships denied port entry was seldom discussed often with only maritime unions speaking out for them (see ABC News, 2020). At the time of writing this, many of them have been forced to stay on infected ships while these arguments raged on, with those falling sick being evacuated to hospitals. This stands in marked contrast to the repatriation of cruise passenger nationals on charter flights by their concerned governments.

This case study of the cruise tourism sector is one example of the injustices and exploitations of the tourism industry operating under neoliberalism. The COVID-19 crisis has revealed often ignored aspects of this system. As the cruise ships became stranded around the world as ports closed to them, the question of exactly where home for them was, as they operated under FOC, began to be discussed. Maritime union advocacy drew attention to the plight of the unfortunate crews, some of whom to date have not been afforded proper protections and care during the pandemic. The cruise sector has benefited from neoliberal ideology and practices and now hopes to benefit from the bonuses of disaster capitalism³ (see Klein, 2008) to access unprecedented government stimulus funds on offer (see OCCRP, 2020).

In the 'The truth about tourism', Tribe argued: 'The job of critical theory is initially to identify which particular ideological influences are at work. Ideology critique then asks whose interests are being served by a particular ideology' (2006, p. 375). As noted by Tribe ( 2006, p. 375), Desmond explained how tourism is itself an ideology: 'tourism is not just an aggregate of commercial activities; it is also an ideological framing of history, nature and tradition; a framing that has the power to reshape culture and nature to its own needs' (Desmond, 1999: xiv). The critical questions to ask include: who defines the boundaries and operations of tourism; who benefits from these forms of tourism; how is power exercised; and how is power limited and controlled? With neoliberalism now arguably on the nose, we have an invaluable window of opportunity to overturn the received wisdom on tourism and reorient it in ways that better serve society.

Addressing the problem of tourism: responsible tourism is not the answer

Some will advocate more responsible forms of tourism as the answer to transforming tourism in these circumstances. Article one of the UNWTO's 'Global Code of Ethics for Tourism' articulates responsible tourism effectively. Titled 'tourism's contribution to mutual understanding and respect between peoples and societies', it states: 'the understanding and promotion of the ethical values common to humanity, with an attitude of tolerance and respect for the diversity of religious, philosophical and moral beliefs, are both the foundation and the consequence of responsible tourism' (UNWTO, 1999). Responsible tourism approaches have been advocated as a way to address the negative social and environmental impacts of tourism. Recently, Jamal et al. ( 2013) argued that responsible tourism approaches, together with a micro-macro ethical framework, were superior to sustainable tourism approaches that have predominated in recent years.

However, others have disagreed that either 'sustainable' or 'responsible' approaches are sufficient:

What has occurred has been investigations of inequality and tourism (Cole & Morgan, 2010) and justice tourism (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2008) which have sought to address questions of who benefits from tourism, how tourism can be made fairer and more just, what are the purposes of tourism and at the more extreme end, how tourism can be mobilised as a tool for securing justice (Higgins-Desbiolles, 2018a).

In work on justice issues in tourism, Higgins-Desbiolles ( 2008) explained how these kinds of efforts aimed at reforming tourism and can easily be co-opted and undermined. We see this co-option in the cruise tourism industry case study above, where CLIA couched the cruise sector clearly as a part of responsible tourism. Higgins-Desbiolles' work ( 2008) offered an analysis using a continuum to illustrate how various reformist interventions advanced changes to tourism processes, but were not sufficient to address ongoing exploitations and injustices that tourism enacts (see Figure 1).

The problem with responsible tourism approaches are that they merely admonish tourism actors to be a little more caring and responsible and to clean up the sharper edges of their poor practices. Responsible tourism advocates fail to recognise that these businesses are a part of a structure that is set up unjustly and extracts profits through exploitative practices. An illustrative example is offered in Whyte's ( 2010) analysis of Indigenous tourism. Using an environmental justice frame for analysis, he explains how Indigenous tourism can result in 'mutually beneficial exploitation' when Indigenous communities are compelled by poverty and structural injustices to engage with forms of tourism that often fail to recognise Indigenous sovereignty and lifeways. Responsible tourism proponents might unwittingly identify these forms of tourism as a 'win-win' because Indigenous peoples actively engage with the 'tourism opportunity'. However, Whyte shows how the structural injustices under which tourism operates undermines the possibility for Indigenous peoples' lifeways to thrive under such conditions, and ultimately undermines their sovereignty in the process.

This analysis of the limitations of responsible tourism as one possible tool in this COVID-19 transformative moment underscores the need to employ critical approaches. If this transformative moment is to be seized with the goal of attaining greater social and ecological justice, we must seek a radical break from what has come before, rather than a more simplistic reformist approach.

What is to be done: socialising tourism for social and ecological justice

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has challenged the premises of neoliberalism that smaller government, individualism, and marketisation benefit people and society. Forms of government interventions, the redevelopment of social safety nets, and the significance of social caring and networks have been the primary responses to challenges of this crisis. After COVID-19, we could take up an agenda to properly socialise tourism. The word 'socialise' could hold multiple meanings including: following the principles of socialism; to act socially well in interactions with others; or to guide on proper ways of behaving with regards to society. In his discussion of 'socialising the stranger', Scott provides an insight into the way socialising tourism is meant here. Scott explained: 'Hospitality becomes an initiation of the process that would result in the socialisation and thus integration into the 'local' society' (Scott, 2006, p. 57). It is both tourists and tourism businesses that must be socialised into supporting the ways, needs and interests of the local societies in which they tour or offer tourism services.

Recent COVID-19 analysis has noted how neoliberal governments have willingly adopted 'socialised' policies in their response to the crisis, for instance by creating the health, social and educational measures they had previously white-anted with privatisation in an effort to avoid widespread social unrest. But I use this phrase 'socialise tourism' in a broader way, meaning to make tourism responsive and answerable to the society in which it occurs. The problem with tourism under neoliberal globalisation is that the power of society to manage, control and benefit from tourism businesses operating in their communities is undermined because the market is outside of their control.

It is well known that governments under neoliberal globalisation have ceded considerable freedom and rights to multinational corporations, which has had profound implications for societies. As Stiglitz reminded us, corporations are created to further society's goals:

Corporations are legal entities governments create to enhance the well-being of their citizens by producing certain conditions that are conducive to investing and conducting business. Governments grant certain rights-limited liability-but we have argued that these are not 'natural rights' or 'human rights' but only instrumental rights, shaped to further societal goals (2007, p. 553).

Discourses from corporate social responsibility advocates have advocated an approach to business requiring their 'social licence to operate' ( Wheeler, 2015; see also Campos et al., 2018 ).

However, the concept of socialising tourism advocated in this work is a call to place tourism in the context of the society in which it occurs and to harness it for the empowerment and wellbeing of local communities. Recent work by Higgins-Desbiolles et al. ( 2019, p. 1936) offering a Community-Centred Tourism Framework assists this radical rethinking of tourism:

If we are to avoid violence, strategies for degrowth in tourism must be progressive, inclusive, just and equitable. This begins with the redefinition of tourism in order to place the rights of local communities above the rights of tourists for holidays and the rights of tourism corporates to make profits.

These authors offered an illustrative model to indicate how such an approach to tourism would radically transform the way tourism could be conducted (see Figure 2).

Key lessons of the COVID-19 crisis have been the vital importance of community, social connections and society; privatisation and marketisation have been shown to be damaging to public health and well-being. We also saw the way the corporate model of tourism was devastated by the efforts to address the pandemic; like global supply chains, global tourism has proved fragile and unreliable. Some commentators are drawing the lesson that a more localised form of tourism would be the way of the future. But that is not taking the thinking far enough. We need tourism in the service to the public and to be accountable to the public.

An agenda to socialise tourism would reorient it to the public good; including:

States could choose to preference local corporations and businesses over multinational corporations (MNCs) (see Stiglitz, 2007). Too often MNCs are not answerable to local places; small to medium tourism enterprises are the ones that should be facilitated for a more just and sustainable future in tourism.

Tourism corporations must pay a fair amount of taxes and must no longer use unjust practices such as tax havens to avoid taxes. These corporations should not be allowed to offload costs as market failures onto the public purse.

If tourism businesses go bankrupt, workers should be the first prioritised debt holder of such businesses and they should be supported to takeover such businesses if they desire this (see Higgins-Desbiolles, 2012 on the Hotel Bauen example).

Alternative models including cooperatives, social enterprises, non-profits and forms of social businesses should be facilitated to support tourism for the public good (see Biddulph, 2018 for critical perspectives).

State tourism commissions must return to their original mission of public service rather than continue down the path of statutory corporations. They must be restructured away from the marketing and public communications focus that has come to dominate under neoliberalism, and instead be comprised of people of diverse expertise that can facilitate a public good form of tourism.

Public good forms of tourism should be facilitated and promoted, including educational tourism, citizen science, social tourism, community exchanges, etc. Informal sectors that facilitate local people's benefit from tourism should also be prioritised.

The commons should be protected and no further privatisation of public assets such as national parks and protected areas should occur. Ecological protection of conservation environments must be a high priority under the threat of climate change

The types of tourism developed should be decided by the local community. The public must be properly consulted on the forms of tourism that are developed in the community according to processes that they identify.

A universal basic income is a basis on which precarious tourism and hospitality work can be made secure. Significant efforts must be made to secure workers' rights and good working conditions. It should no longer be tolerated that tourism workers do not receive a living wage and secure conditions for their labour in the industry.

This agenda needs more dedicated work and fleshing out to ensure we set tourism on different pathway so that it supports social and ecological justice. There is both possibility and danger in this transformative moment offered by the crisis of COVID-19. As the Tourism Alert and Action Forum warned:

Industries such as tourism will be keen to get back to business as usual, grabbing on to the phrase undertourism to ramp it up again. Governments will be keen to take advantage of control and surveillance capacities that are being imposed on the excuse of the crisis and to extend these further. Whole segments of our communities are being dismissed as disposable, including workers in the informal sectors of tourism who will find that starvation and homelessness are their direct threat as well as COVID-19. It is foreseeable that an elite form of travel will result (TAAF, 2020).

This work on socialising tourism requires both thought and action to ensure that we do not fail at this moment to secure real transformation from the disaster that the COVID-19 crisis has brought.

Conclusion

'The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters'- Antonio Gramsci (cited in Žižek, 2010 ) ⁴

There is some hubris in trying to develop effective analysis on a global crisis when it has not yet fully unfolded. It would seem that we are in an era of major change of the equivalent of a world war or great depression. There are contrasting views on whether this should be a source of great optimism or fear. If correct that we are living through a major transition, this assessment of Gramsci cautions us to be alert to a possible time of monsters. In a world where growing inequality has led to massive numbers of vulnerable populations (Kearney, 2017), it is clear that the COVID-19 pandemic and actions to address its spread are likely to impact these vulnerable communities in disproportionate and deadly fashion (see, for instance, Evelyn, 2020; Kazmin, 2020 ). Thus, it matters how we support a transition for greater justice and well-being.

This article has offered an analysis using a critical theory lens to briefly uncover the ways in which tourism has supported neoliberal injustices and exploitation. Taking the assumption that the COVID-19 pandemic crisis offers a rare and invaluable opportunity to rethink and reset tourism, this article has explained why 'responsible' approaches to tourism do not offer sufficient means to break with these structures and processes of injustice, oppression and exploitation. Instead, this work has drawn on recent theorisation to redefine and reorient tourism based on the rights and interests of local communities and local peoples. It advances this work by further theorising a way tourism could be 'socialised' and made accountable to social and ecological limits.

In the neoliberal era, tourism facilitated and enacted serious inequities and injustices on people and wrought significant ecological damage, including contributions to global climate change. As we try to give birth a new era in the aftermath of COVID-19, it is our task as concerned scholars in tourism to offer our contributions to imagine ways tourism can be developed to enable human thriving and ecological recovery. Socialising tourism to such purposes would be a positive way forward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Thatcher's full statement was: 'They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours' (from an interview in Women's Own in 1987 as cited in Thatcher, 2013).

2 'People of Colour' is not a satisfactory term but it is used to encompass the range of 'non-white' people who do not benefit from privileged positions of power (see Glover, 2016).

3 Klein used the term 'shock doctrine' to describe the strategy of using the public's disorientation following a collective shock - wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters - to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called 'shock therapy'. Corporations use this to advance their interests and ability to profit through what she called 'disaster capitalism' (2008).

4 This is from a liberal translation of Gramsci popularized by Slavoj Žižek ( 2010), which amends 'In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear' to 'Now is the time of monsters'.

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Additional information

Author information

Freya Higgins-Desbiolles
Freya Higgins-Desbiolles is a Senior Lecturer in Tourism Management, Business Unit, University of South Australia. Her work focuses on social justice issues in tourism, hospitality and events. She has worked with communities, non-governmental organisations and businesses that seek to harness tourism for human rights, justice and equitable futures.

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Socialising tourism for social and ecological justice after COVID-19

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Abstract Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic of 2019-2020 has the potential to transform the tourism industry as well as the context in which it operates. This global crisis in which travel, tourism, hospitality and events have been shut down in many parts of the world, provides an opportunity to uncover the possibilities in this historic transformative moment.

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Academic article- published under open access status

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Academic article- published under open access status

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Stefan Gössling, Daniel Scott & C. Michael Hall (2020) Pandemics, tourism and global change: a rapid assessment of COVID-19, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, DOI: 10.1080/09669582.2020.1758708

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C. Michael Hall, Daniel Scott & Stefan Gössling (2020) Pandemics, transformations and tourism: be careful what you wish for, Tourism Geographies, DOI: 10.1080/14616688.2020.1759131

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Abstract

Abstract
Disease outbreaks and pandemics have long played a role in societal and economic change. However, the nature of such change is selective, meaning that it is sometimes minimal and, at other times, and change or transformation may be unexpected, potentially even reinforcing contemporary paradigms. A comprehensive overview of pandemics and their effects is provided. This is used to help contextualise the COVID-19 pandemic, its impact on tourism and government, industry and consumer response. Drawing on the available literature, factors that will affect tourism and destination recovery are then identified. Some measures will continue or even expand present growth orientations in tourism while others may contribute to sustainability. It is concluded that that the selective nature of the effects of COVID-19 and the measures to contain it may lead to reorientation of tourism in some cases, but in others will contribute to policies reflecting the selfish nationalism of some countries. However, the response to planetary limits and sustainable tourism requires a global approach. Despite clear evidence of this necessity, the possibility for a comprehensive transformation of the tourism system remains extremely limited without a fundamental transformation of the entire planet.

摘要

疾病爆发和大流行病长期以来在社会和经济变革中发挥着作用。然而, 这种变化的性质是有选择性的, 这意味着它有时是最小的, 而在其他时候, 变化或转变可能是出乎意料的, 甚至有可能强化当代范式。全面回顾了大流行病及其影响, 这有助于将COVID-19大流行病、其对旅游业和政府影响、产业和消费者反应具体化。在现有文献的基础上, 确定了影响旅游业和目的地恢复的因素。一些措施将继续甚至扩大目前旅游业的增长方向, 而其他措施可能有助于可持续性。结论是, COVID-19效应的选择性和遏制措施在某些情况下可能会导致旅游业的重新定位, 但在另一些情况下, 会有助于制定反映一些国家民族利己主义的政策。然而, 要应对全球范围的限制和可持续的旅游业, 就必须采取全球性措施。尽管有明确的证据表明这一必要性, 但如果没有整个地球的根本性转变, 全面改变旅游系统的可能性仍然极其有限。

Keywords: COVID-19, disaster recovery, sustainable tourism, disaster management, pandemic impact, pandemic response, crisis management, resilience, tourism policy, third-order change

关键词: COVID-19, 灾难恢复, 可持续旅游, 灾难管理, 大流行病影响, 大流行病应对, 危机管理, 恢复力, 旅游政策, 三阶变化

Introduction

Pandemics and new diseases have long had a transformational effect on environments and societies. Arguably one cannot understand, for example, the Europeanisation of the New World, as well as other colonial conquests, without considering the transfer of Old World diseases that killed many of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, Australasia, and the Pacific (Crosby, 2004; Diamond, 1998). In the same way the history of Europe has been shaped by the plagues and various disease outbreaks for millennia. Such pandemics were essentially transformative because of their enormous demographic impacts and the effects that this had on production systems and the capacities of societies to adapt to external change. To reinterpret Wolfe et al. ( 2007), infectious diseases, as a leading cause of human morbidity, mortality and societal apprehension, have long exerted important selective forces on politics, society, the economy, and human's attitudes to nature, as well as the human genome. Therefore, the transformational actions and possibilities of modern pandemics are nothing new, they perhaps just seem that way because it is affecting the developed world and generations who have either not been exposed to, or otherwise just forgotten given access to antibiotics and modern medicine, the impacts of pandemic and the essential role of mobility within them.

Pandemics - definitional and transformational opportunities?

There is no single accepted definition of the term pandemic (Morens et al., 2009). Nevertheless, they have several common components (Morens et al., 2009):

Wide geographic extension - they are widely spatially distributed or are global;

Disease movement or spread via transmission that can be traced from location to location;

High attack rates and explosiveness, i.e., multiple cases appear within a short time;

Minimal population immunity;

Novelty, they are new, and/or associated with novel variants of existing organisms.

In addition, they may also be regarded as infectious, contagious and severe (Doshi, 2010; Morens et al., 2009). However, confusion still occurs as the notion of a pandemic may be sensationalised or misunderstood. For example, the prepandemic/pandemic stages model of the (WHO 2009) to address influenza outbreaks was designed to inform and communicate public health responses rather than indicate the seriousness or severity of a disease situation (Morens & Taubenberger, 2011; Watson, 2011).

Unfortunately, controversy over the definition of a pandemic and previous national and international responses and criticisms is arguably why there was possibly a delay in the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring COVID-19 as a pandemic (Buranyi, 2020). Indeed, WHO's previous pandemic responses, as in the case of COVID-19, have been subject to accusations of politicisation and lack of transparency. For example, Cohen and Carter ( 2010) argued that scientists advising WHO on planning for an influenza pandemic had done paid work for pharmaceutical firms that stood to gain from the guidance they were preparing. The significant point being that the declaration of a pandemic contributes to the political momentum to enact public health measures including, where available, the provision of vaccines (Bijl & Schellekens, 2011). Nevertheless, the comments by Nicoll and McKee ( 2010) following their review of the WHO and European response are particularly cogent: 'To now neglect preparation for pandemics and other emergencies would be like a town investing in a good fire brigade that can deal with a major blaze. If in the first few years, it only has to deal with some house fires would anyone advise retiring the firemen and selling off the fire engines?'. Yet while public health researchers extol the value of coordinated international health security approaches to effectively respond to both pandemics and contribute to sustainable development, the reality is that, in part because of the experience of previous pandemics, many governments have chosen to focus more on national interest rather than international solidarity. As Buranyi ( 2020) observed in relation to the COVID-19 response, 'Many wealthy nations have not only pursued their own national strategies for public health, but have also withdrawn from the globalised world of diplomacy and trade that they themselves set up'. Aggressive nationalism has become normalised, as Lawrence Gostin, director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, stated 'All the previous rules about global norms, public health and understanding of what's expected in terms of an outbreak has crumbled ... None of us know where this is leading' (quoted in Buranyi, 2020).

Pandemic risk and impact

Yet, coronaviruses are not the only pandemic threat with much concern being given to influenza as well as other diseases (Fauci & Morens, 2012; Jonas, 2014; Labonte et al., 2011). Table 1 illustrates some of the major pandemics and disease outbreaks of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Several of these pandemics have become "normalised", i.e. they are part of the global health business as usual, or to be more precise developing country business as usual, even though their annual impact can be enormous. For example, globally in 2013, there were an estimated 1.8 million new HIV infections, 29.2 million prevalent HIV cases, and 1.3 million HIV deaths (Murray et al., 2014). To these we could add malaria, which accounts for around a million deaths per year, the deaths from which, like HIV/AIDS, occurs mainly in Africa (Murray et al., 2012), as well as diseases such as measles, globally reported cases of which increased by 48.1% between 2017 and 2018, with 98 countries reporting more measles cases in 2018 compared to 2017 (Durrheim et al., 2019), and influenza. For example, Iuliano et al. ( 2018). estimates that between 291,000 - 646,000 seasonal influenza-associated respiratory deaths (4·0 - 8·8 per 100,000 individuals) occur annually, while the average annual total economic burden of influenza in the United States alone has been estimated at $11.2 billion ($6.3-$25.3 billion) (Putri et al., 2018). Such endemic diseases may also suggest a likely health future for COVID-19 responses given that, in the absence of a vaccine, we would see seasonal peaks of infection of the disease as it becomes part of the "normal" disease exposure for humans (Chen et al., 2011). What is also perhaps significant in the list of pandemics and global diseases is the absence of significant transformations that rise from them. They clearly have economic, tourism and social impact but they have arguably not become significant transition events. New health concepts that have emerged in response to zoonotic diseases, especially "One Health" which sees human and biodiversity health as entwined, are clearly very significant in light of the role of global environmental change and human and biotic wellbeing. However, while they have generated research (Hinchliffe, 2015; Zinsstag et al., 2012) and institutional (World Bank, 2012) interest, they have had little policy impact, and even less on tourism, even though relevant literature recognises the health risks to animal and human populations arising from tourism activities in remote locations (Coker et al., 2011; Hall, 2007; Thompson, 2013); as well as long-recognised risks to human health posed by transport-related pollution which make individuals substantially more susceptible to respiratory diseases (Clay et al., 2018; Sterpetti, 2020; Wu et al., 2020). Unfortunately, the impacts of climate change, to which tourism is both a significant contributor and substantially affected by (Scott et al., 2019), are only expected to increase the frequency of pandemics and disease outbreaks (Ebi et al., 2017a, Ebi et al., 2017b; Kavanagh et al., 2019/ 2020).

28 April 2020

Although travel and tourism are critical for carrying disease and disease vectors (Browne et al., 2016), and pandemics have major impacts on tourism given the role of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPI), such as quarantine and border control (Ryu et al., 2020), there is a surprisingly limited literature on the interrelationships between pandemics and tourism, and its long term implications. Although students of tourism are not alone in this, for example, in reflecting on social science research on the 1918-1919 flu pandemic ("Spanish influenza"), Phillips and Killingray ( 2003) observed, with respect to professional historians 'Overlooking cataclysmic natural disasters, they have focussed, rather, on political, economic, and intellectual processes to explain change over time'. In the case of tourism, the health responses on travel during pandemics have remained essentially the same since the Spanish flu and earlier. 'The harsh reality is that we have no 21st century tools to fight COVID-19. There is no vaccine or treatment. All we have is the methods that were used to control epidemics in the early 20th century. Those, as we shall see, tend to be very economically disruptive' (Baldwin & Weder di Mauro, 2020, p.11). If COVID-19 was the equivalent to a severe pandemic such as the Spanish flu it has been estimated that the world's GDP would fall by between -4.8% and -6.7% (McKibbin & Fernando, 2020; McKibbin & Sidorenko, 2006).

Some of the ways in which tourism is affected by COVID-19 is illustrated in Figure 1 which details a range of short and longer term responses to pandemics, such as COVID-19. The figure highlights the importance of transport networks and transit regions for connectivity within the tourism system. This is especially significant given the enormous reduction in flights as a result of COVID-19 as well as the impacts on specific travel modes, such as cruise ships. In a rapid assessment of the impacts of COVID-19, Gössling et al. ( 2020) reported that as of 31 March, 2020, over 90% of the world's population were in countries with some level of international travel restrictions and many of these countries also had some degree of restrictions on internal movement, including limited air travel and stay at home orders. Moreover, for some intercontinental tourism markets, the extent to which transit regions, such as major aviation hubs, are open to tourists is extremely important for destination access. When access and mobility is removed the effects are substantial. In terms of the accommodation sector for the week of 21 March, 2020, STR (2020) reported that in comparison to the same week in 2019, guest numbers had declined by 50% or more, in virtually all countries. The IATA (14 April, 2020), scenario of the effects of COVID-19 was that full year air passenger revenues would be 55% below 2019, while traffic falls 48%.

The capacity for a destination to respond to pandemics has been framed in terms of the stages of a disaster, which also highlights the extent to which destinations and industry may learn from prior pandemic or other disaster experiences and adapt accordingly (Hall & Prayag, 2020). Significantly, the systems approach highlights that how destination and industry responds is also affected in the long-term by competing destinations and businesses. This may have implications for recovery trajectories as some destinations may deliberately position themselves in low cost terms, with little concern for externalities (e.g., introducing a second wave into the resident population), in order to try and increase visitor numbers and employment possibilities as soon as possible. Others, such as Hawaii (McAvoy, 2020), may continue to attempt to restrict arrivals and hotel reservations to reduce the potential of a second wave of infections or, like Singapore, introduce new third party audited cleaning standards to rebuild traveller trust (Singapore Tourism Board, 2020).

So if not transformed what will the tourism recovery look like?

Pandemics are unlike many other disasters and crises that tourism has experienced. Although, as with any other disaster related tourism attention-issue cycle, consumer and industry confidence will rise and fall in relation to media reporting on the impacts of COVID-19 (Gössling et al., 2020) and government interventions to boost the economy, the capacity for recovery of the tourism system is fundamentally affected by the imposition of NPIs because of the extent to which they restrict mobility (Ryu et al., 2020). And without mobility there is no tourism. In addition to general disease and heath communication strategies and measures, e.g. hygiene measures, four broad areas of NPIs that affect tourism can be identified: a) social distancing; b) curbs on crowding; c) restrictions on domestic and international travel; and, d) quarantine requirements (Fong et al., 2020; Ryu et al., 2020). Social distancing requirements reduce the capacity of hospitality operations, such as restaurants, to be able to host guests while the most extreme measures require the closure of operations so as to prevent social contact. Bans on public gatherings and closure of public places, affect tourist activities but they also limit the hosting of events, meetings and conferences. Figure 2 provides an overview of the factors and interventions driving tourism change and recovery in relation to COVID-19.

Factors and interventions driving tourism change and recovery.

,

,

Restrictions on travel have been widely enacted in response to COVID-19. In many countries, this has meant stay a home orders and domestic restrictions on moving between jurisdictions except for permanent residents and essential services and closure of international borders except to returning nationals and permanent residents/visa holders (Wilson et al., 2020). Removal of such restrictions will be integral to tourism recovery. Initially, this will be at a domestic level, especially in locations in which new cases are no longer being recorded (Worthington, 2020). For most countries the tourism restart will occur domestically and likely include domestic tourism promotion campaigns to encourage people to travel locally and regionally to stimulate the economy and for continued Covid-19 surveillance and safety. There will be an uneven recovery as some markets will be aligned with early phases of restarting tourism. An emphasis on saving local restaurants, VFR tourism to reconnect with loved ones, essential business travel, and parks and nature tourism where physical distancing can be accomplished, will be the focus of initial tourism revival. Seniors tourism will continue to be discouraged or restricted because of vulnerability to Covid-19. Sports and events tourism will be restricted until a vaccine is developed and widely deployed, a timeline estimated to be 12-18 months (Liu et al., 2020). China, South Korea and other countries that were among the earliest to experience the pandemic are now entering this cautious restart phase, and their experience will be closely observed by the rest of the world (Koty, 2020).

The overall recovery of tourist numbers will primarily be determined by the interplay of economic and health interventions that include travel restrictions. Individual country decisions cannot enable the restoration of international aviation and other transport services when other markets remain closed (IATA, 2020). As the pandemic wanes, the world will be poorer and more divided, which is not a recipe for a strong rebound in the tourism economy let alone a coordinated, strategic effort to transform it toward sustainability. There will be strong political and industry pressures to "restart" the economy as quickly as possible and generate employment in a period of major global economic recession (i.e., the International Monetary Fund ( 2020) projects the global economy to contract -3% in 2020, much worse than during the 2008-09 financial crisis). The mass unemployment caused by the unprecedented rapid shutdown of economies in many leading outbound tourism countries will work against international travel for cost, risks of a second wave, and likely patriotic messages to rebuild the domestic economy. The latter includes the promotion of domestic tourism as a tool by some governments to reduce leakage from the national economy and to bolster regional centres and rural economies. Such a policy focus may have the unintended outcome of creating new sustainable tourism trajectories with positive implications for lower emissions, place-based economic development and travel and tourism practices. Critically, the depth and length of the recession/depression will be the main driver of such socio-economic change. However, the domestic focus on tourism is likely to only be temporary while constraints on mobility remain in place.

The transformative possibilities are questionable under conditions when the focus of most governments will be to generate jobs, even lower paid, casual and part-time positions, in order to reduce unemployment rates. The optimistic take for those seeking the adoption of more sustainable, local, and environmentally friendly forms of tourism will be that COVID-19 and the economic effects of the measures to curb its spread will provide an exogenous shock that will change tourism related public policy. As (Greener, 2001, p.136) noted with respect to policy learning, 'The oil price and currency shocks of the early 1970s helped create hostile economic conditions which made it possible for advocates of monetarism to question the ability of Keynesians to run the economy". However, as he also went on to note, 'policy makers may well realise that existing policy is not working, but be afraid of the political implications of appearing to learn from the error' (Greener, 2001, p.140). Indeed, if existing policy instruments were substantially altered and new one's adopted, 'policymakers could then be accused of making a policy "U-turn" and abandoning their values' (Hall, 2011a, p.662). Instead, in a search for employment generation and government income to pay the costs of industry bail-outs the wealth inequalities associated with market-led neoliberalization, the emissions of the hyper-mobile and the rundown of natural capital may be set to continue and even enhanced. As Sparke and Anguelov ( 2012) commented, 'Like the systems that use biometrics to facilitate fast-track clearance at borders and airport checkpoints, the privatization and individualization of high-speed disease surveillance also represents an adaptation of state administration in the interests of ... a subset of privileged consumers who can afford the technological fast lanes and VIP services'.

Conclusion

Although there was substantial political and institutional interest, the global financial crisis of 2008-09 did not result in a new era of green growth and the global trajectories of tourism emissions and numbers only continued to increase. While the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in, quite literally, parked carbon assets in the form of cruise ships and aircraft, and a substantial drop in emissions, the possibilities of that being sustained, even at much more moderate levels, are doubtful. As Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst for the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, said: 'The big question is whether government stimulus measures lead to pollution levels rebounding above the levels before the crisis, like happened after the 2008 financial crisis' (quoted in Ellis-Petersen et al., 2020). There is substantial concern in the renewable energy sector that the pandemic, low oil prices, and economic recovery packages will derail the economics for solar and wind projects needed to green the electricity grid (National Law Review, 2020; Maisch, 2020; Fox-Penner, 2020), which is foundational to lowering emissions in accommodation and electrified ground transport. Furthermore, even if airlines and cruise ship companies are not bailed out the assets still exist and will provide opportunities for budget and low-cost ventures at a time of cheap capital and demands for employment generation and yet further deregulation. In such a situation, the rebound effects of tourism recovery may place the industry on an even more unsustainable trajectory, especially if aircraft and ship manufacturers keep adding capacity to the global tourism system on the basis of their very own projections of demand.

Changes to tourism as a result of COVID-19 will be uneven in space and time. While some destinations will undoubtedly reconsider the nature of their tourism industry and focus more on local and more sustainable forms of tourism, without substantial institutional and governmental interventions, which are currently overwhelmed with saving lives and creating conditions to restart domestic economies and education systems, the juggernaut that is international tourism will roll on. For many destinations and governments, especially those with authoritarian tendencies, the focus on tourism will be business-as-usual. Furthermore, there are not enough stakeholders in the tourism sector that question the sustainability of success defined by growth in visitor numbers or increases in material consumption to expect transformational change driven from within. The resilience of growth in international tourism numbers and the capacity of tourism to rebound from crisis has long been recognised. Given the likelihood that the recovery from COVID-19 may well eventually be more of the same, be careful what you wish for.

Disclsoure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Year(s)

Pathogen

Cases/mortality

Comments

2015-present

Zika (Americas, primarily Brazil; flavivirus primarily transmitted by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes)

Unknown number of cases. Few if any deaths, but can result in microcephaly in infants born by infected mothers and in Guillain-Barré syndrome.

No vaccine available. The World Bank estimates that the short-term impact of the ZIKV outbreak for 2016 in Latin America and the Caribbean was about US$3.5 billion primarily in countries where tourism is significant, especially given the hosting of major sporting events.

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Additional information

Author information

C. Michael Hall
Michael Hall is a Professor at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand; Docent in Geography, University of Oulu, Finland; and Guest Professor at the Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Lund University, Helsingborg, as well as the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, Kalmar, both in Sweden. He has published widely on tourism, regional development, biosecurity, and global environmental change.

Daniel Scott
Daniel Scott is a University Research Chair and Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo and a Vice-Chancellor Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at the University of Surrey. He has worked on the human dimensions of climate change for over 20 years and been a contributing author and expert reviewer for the IPCC Third, Fourth and Fifth Assessment Reports as well as the Special Report on 1.5 °C warming.

Stefan Gössling
Stefan Gössling is a professor at the Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Lund University, as well as the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University, both in Sweden. He is also the research coordinator at the Western Norway Research Institute. He is interested in all aspects related to the sustainability of tourism and transportation.

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Pandemics, transformations and tourism: be careful what you wish for

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Abstract Abstract Disease outbreaks and pandemics have long played a role in societal and economic change. However, the nature of such change is selective, meaning that it is sometimes minimal and, at other times, and change or transformation may be unexpected, potentially even reinforcing contemporary paradigms. A comprehensive overview of pandemics and their effects is provided.

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The War on Tourism - Jim Butcher 4th May 2020

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The War on Tourism - Jim Butcher 4th May 2020

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In the discussions about the future of tourism and hospitality post lockdown, the lines are being drawn between proponents of a 'new normal' based on a radical down-scaling of global tourism, and those proposing recovery through growth.

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Covid-19 spells disaster for the tourism and hospitality industries. In the short term, millions of jobs have been lost and businesses have been devastated. In the medium and longer term, a deep recession is likely and that will have a sustained impact on luxuries such as tourism and hospitality.

Tourism and hospitality rely on mobility and human contact - two things that have become problematic in the face of the pandemic. Some worry that social distancing will survive beyond Covid-19, as a new fear-induced cultural norm. Others speculate about ways to space people properly on the beach, in restaurants and in aircraft. Others write about expunging handshakes, hugs and kisses on the cheek from our culture. Hospitality itself is threatened by this virus.

While wealthier countries may be able to mitigate the very worst economic effects through measures unprecedented outside of wartime, many tourist destinations in less affluent countries will be hit even harder. This is accentuated by the fact that they are less likely to be able to look to a domestic tourism market to compensate for lower levels of international leisure travel.

Ideas are being floated to help the industry. Some firms are allowing customers to carry this year's booked holiday over to next year. Hospitality businesses, large and small, have also been active in offering their skills and facilities in the service of the fight against Covid-19. But overall the industry is bracing itself for a massive crash. Many will be looking to ensure recovery is as swift and comprehensive as possible.

Though no one doubts that coronavirus is a disaster, rather than redoubling efforts to help prospective recovery, some industry commentators see the pandemic as a chance to hit pause, rewind a little, and change the track. Reform is emphasised over recovery. And that reform often looks forward to a diminished industry and lower levels of leisure mobility.

Since the 1980s, there has been a significant lobby - principally in universities, but also in non-governmental organisations and among environmental groups - to reform tourism. Though it is an industry that has brought greater freedom and liberty to many, it started to be viewed less in terms of its economic and cultural potential, and more as a problem. Jost Krippendorf's 1987 book, The Holiday Makers, anticipated a growing critique of mass tourism and the advocacy of ethical and sustainable travel that became mainstream from the 1990s onwards. I have argued elsewhere that this was a conceit based on a caricature of the perceived crudeness of the masses on their holidays.

The tourism reformers advocate a more ethical industry, attuned to planetary and local limits. Some even see Covid-19 as an unexpected 'opportunity' in this regard. One commentator insists: 'Everything must change: the way we fly, the way we dine, how we wait in line - even how we go to the beach. Our very concept of vacation may have to change.' He argues that 'this will probably be good for us'.

At the heart of the demands among the tourism reformers are degrowth, challenging 'consumerism' and the promotion of localism.

First, degrowth advocates at the Political Ecology Network argue that 'even if the Covid-19 crisis ends relatively soon, we cannot afford to return to levels of travel experienced previously, particularly by the wealthiest segment of the world's population. This is not only because of the social unrest overtourism has provoked, but also because of the industry's environmental damages... which were already beyond unsustainable.'

Such complaints are out of all proportion. The large majority of the world's population do not travel internationally at all. And there have only been very small-scale protests in very particular circumstances over the impacts of tourism.

The much-hyped Barcelona protests against overtourism in 2017 often consisted of just four or five supporters of Arran Jovent, the youth wing of Candidatura d'Unitat Popular - a party whose vote share in the 2019 local elections was under four per cent. These protests amounted to little more than activists 'hijacking' buses or posting stickers saying 'tourists go home' around the city. While the rapid growth of mass tourism in the city has inevitably created tensions and problems, Barcelona's transformation over the past decades is generally considered a success.

Moreover, degrowth would impoverish millions. Surely a lesson from the experience of Covid-19 so far is that while overtourism can pose challenges, compared to the 'under-tourism' of a locked-down Europe it looks like a very good problem to have.

The Political Ecology Network argues for degrowth in the context of a societal wide transition to 'post-capitalism'. Strikingly, as part of this, it calls for 'direct restrictions on the quantity of mass transport - and especially airplanes - reaching a given destination'.

In the past, radical movements looked to transcend capitalism by liberating the forces of production from the fetters of the social system. But today's post-capitalists see the lockdown as a chance to point to the perils of our apparently excessive freedom. They argue for greater state restrictions on mobility. This was not what Marx had in mind when he speculated about a post-capitalism in which it would be 'possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind'.

The second main critique of tourism is related to consumerism. Academic Freya Higgins-Desbiolles says the main problem with tourism is the 'culture-ideology of consumerism'. Thanks to social advances, 'consumption patterns that were once the preserve of the rich have become endemic'. But surely making the privileges of the wealthy more widely available is something to be celebrated, not feared? The expansion of consumption of air travel over the past 60 years has been a truly liberating phenomenon for millions.

Third, there is the promotion of localism. This is far from new, but Covid-19 is seen by reformers as an additional reason to follow this path. The Political Ecology Network argues that, 'This effort should also aim to re-localise economic activity to make destinations less vulnerable to vicissitudes of global markets generally'. For Higgins-Desbiolles, 'We might learn that not travelling long distances didn't stop us travelling; it just enlivened us to the richness of local travel'. This makes no sense. While walks into the countryside from my house have kept me sane during the lockdown (so far), why should experiences like that be seen in opposition to travelling further afield?

Overall, the reformers' proposals to 'rein in the tourism industry on a macro and structural level', would stymie the hopes of many businesses, large and small, to re-establish themselves and to re-generate employment. Poverty would increase greatly as a direct result. The claim that tourism reform is an ethical position, or even a realistic one, is false. Our efforts should focus on the recovery of tourism as soon as possible. And we should champion growth, ambition and freedom to that end.

Jim Butcher is a lecturer and writer on tourism and politics. He blogs at politics of tourism and tweets at @jimbutcher2.
Picture by: Getty. To enquire about republishing spiked's content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

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Covid-19 spells disaster for the tourism and hospitality industries. In the short term, millions of jobs have been lost and businesses have been devastated. In the medium and longer term, a deep recession is likely and that will have a sustained impact on luxuries such as tourism and hospitality.

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PROSPECTS FOR RADICAL CHANGES IN TOURISM POST COVID

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PROSPECTS FOR RADICAL CHANGES IN TOURISM POST COVID

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Raoul Bianchi

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#TourismPostCOVID19 | Responsible Tourism

Despite advances in the argument for a transformation of tourism brought about by the pandemic crisis, there is a need for a more robust, multi-scale policy of intervention to challenge the power of tourism capital.

Photography by: Harare, Zimbabwe. ILO.

Following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic all tourist destinations worldwide have imposed travel restrictions while 45 per cent are partially or fully closed. Despite experience of previous disruptions, whether caused by terrorism, financial crises or indeed previous pandemics, few could have predicted the scope and severity of the impact Covid-19 has had on societies and economies worldwide. Such is the belief in tourism's resilience that in late January the UNWTO was predicting 3 to 4 per cent growth in tourism for 2020 while the Secretary-General stressed that "in these times of uncertainty and volatility, tourism remains a reliable economic sector".

The pandemic has not only highlighted the magnitude and scope of tourism's global economic importance. It has underscored the manner in which the interconnected global architecture of tourism and associated flows of mobility act as a vector for the transmission of such pathogens, nowhere more so than on densely-crowded cruise ships that act as floating petri-dishes of incubation. The UNWTO forecasts that international arrivals could fall by 20 to 30 per cent relative to 2019 while revenues will decline by US$350-400 billion. The OECD forecasts a 45 per cent decline in international tourism in 2020 rising to 70 per cent if the recovery is delayed until September.

That this constitutes a profound crisis and major turning point for global tourism is beyond doubt. It nevertheless remains vital that we resist calls to simply 'aid' the recovery of the industry, and to challenge interpretations of the crisis as a mere " bump in the road". While it is too early for a comprehensive analysis of the pandemic's repercussions for the political-economic structure of tourism going forward, many are optimistic that the abrupt collapse of tourism will enable destinations to take stock and to challenge the current growth trajectory of tourism and align it with the social and ecological limits. Certain destinations have already begun to rethink how to rebuild their tourism sectors in line with sustainability goals. For some, such as Hawaii, this involves limiting visitor numbers and redirecting marketing towards smaller groups of higher-paying tourists seeking cultural and natural experiences. Amsterdam meanwhile has embraced Raworth's regenerative model of doughnut economics in order to realign the urban economy with social and environmental goals.

However, many of the responses thus far fail to consider the political logics of the impending struggles to shape the structural and organisational contours of the global tourism industries following the unprecedented shock brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. This reflection will consider some of the challenges for a radical, transformative break with growth-led, corporate-managed, resource-intensive models of tourism development, in the light of the current and emerging political-economic configurations of tourism.

The great disruption and emerging corporate landscapes of tourism

Despite signs of progress a systemic paradigm shift towards more sustainable and equitable forms of tourism remains inconsistent and hindered by the relentless pursuit of growth and tourism's integral role in the continuous expansion of capitalism, a fact recognised even by many in the mainstream media. Prior to the outbreak of the pandemic, sustainable tourism dialogues had begun to pivot around the UNWTO's 2015-2030 sustainable tourism development agenda - framed by the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - the central premise of which is that the transition to inclusive and sustainable tourism can be engineered through the managed growth of tourism. Despite having acknowledged the problems associated with over-tourism the UNWTO has renewed its commitment to " sustainable growth " in response to the pandemic.

That said, the pandemic has hastened the decline of the neoliberal economic orthodoxies that have fuelled three decades of hyper-globalisation and market-led growth, as states have stepped in to prevent the collapse of businesses and mitigate the effects of spiralling unemployment. As a result of the suspension of travel and related 'lockdowns' the WTTC has forecast an unprecedented loss of 100 million tourism jobs worldwide together alongside a 30 per cent decrease (US$2.7 billion) in tourism's contribution to global GDP. Further to the immediate cost in terms of bankruptcies, unemployment and lost livelihoods the precise structure and power coordinates of the global political economy of tourism that will emerge in the pandemic's wake is difficult to predict. This fact is further complicated by the hybrid and composite nature of the tourism 'industries' characterised as they are by manifold inter-connections between firms of different size and capitals organised across globally-differentiated regions in an unequal division of tourism labour

The pandemic has also laid bare vulnerabilities where tourism comprises higher than average proportions of GDP and employment, not least in Spain and Italy, in many ways the European epicentres of the pandemic. Even when travel restarts, domestic markets cannot easily compensate for lost international demand, although an increased emphasis on domestic tourism is likely in the short-term. Tourism supply is by its very nature perishable, nor can tourism and hospitality infrastructures be easily repurposed for alternative economic usage. An exception perhaps are hotel real estate assetsthat can potentially be sold to release liquidity, although commercial real estate activity has also slowed considerably.

It is estimated that global hotel supply will contract by 2 per cent. While most corporate hotel groups are likely to survive thanks to a combination of state aid and private financing, the many thousands of small to medium sized firms which make up around 80 per cent of global tourism struggle to access emergency government assistance. Despite sizeable cash reserves and access to finance many of the corporate digital platforms which had been driving significant market concentration in recent years have announced major restructuring plans and job losses, although it is likely that some will consolidate and expand their market position.

The crisis has also laid bare the tensions between the interests of global capital and transnational corporations on the one hand and those of states on the other. Companies that have consistently preached the virtues of low tax-regulatory regimes are now amongst the most fervent proponents of state aid, not least the airline industry which may face global revenue losses of US$250 billion and a permanent loss of 750,000 jobs in the US alone. Aggressive lobbying has enabled airlines to secure vital state aid to stay afloat. While there is a clear rationale and urgent need to provide support for laid-off workers in industries that employs tens of millions of workers, cheap air travel has been a major contributor to the relentless growth of tourism and carbon emissions.

Most governments have stopped short of taking airlines into public ownership, with the exception of Alitalia. Rather than simply bail out this sector the crisis provides an opportunity for states to orchestrate a transition to sustainable transport systems aligned with improved working conditions and binding emissions targets. Indeed, Air France-KLM has been granted a combined French-Dutch state aid package of around €10 billion in return for a commitment to halve emissions by 2030 and suspend dividend payments. US airlines in contrast have merely been encouraged to "refrain" from using bailout money for share buy backs or dividend payments until September 2021, and to limit executive pay until late March 2022. Although it too is a major employer the 'US' cruise industry - in which three companies account for 75 per cent of the global cruise market - was nevertheless excluded from the US$500 billion corporate bail-out fund by virtue of the fact that they have worked to systematically minimize their tax liabilities and circumvent strict labour and environmental standards by sailing under overseas 'flags of convenience'.

There are signs too that the pandemic may hasten geo-political and economic power shifts that were already apparent prior to the outbreak. While weaker states may suffer as foreign investment moves out of emerging markets, Chinese investors had already been busily acquiring Western tourism, hotel and property assets prior to the pandemic, including such iconic European tourism brands as Club Mediterranée and Thomas Cook. Thanks to sizeable foreign currency reserves and demand for domestic travel, well-capitalized state-backed Chinese enterprises are well placed to withstand the economic fallout and to step up investments into major tourism, hospitality, aviation and real estate assets.

Those most severely impacted by the pandemic are the millions of vulnerable workers and small enterprises in small islands and other low-income tourism destinations across the Global South. Without international financial assistance these states will be hard pressed to keep local tourism businesses afloat and furlough workers and are likely see their public debt burdens rise. A major proportion of global tourism and hospitality workers comprise women and/or migrants often working in the informal sector with little or no recourse to state support and social protection. Notwithstanding greater access to state support, tourism and hospitality workers in wealthy states too have not been spared. In the US 98 per cent of Unite Here trade union members have lost their jobs while trades unions in Europe estimate that almost the entire 12m strong hospitality workforce has either been furloughed, or been made redundant. Meanwhile a significant number of low-paid cruise ship workers, many of whom hail from developing countries, remain stranded at sea and unable to return home.

Towards democratic, equitable and sustainable tourism?

In her critically acclaimed analysis of "disaster capitalism" The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein cites noted free market thinker Milton Friedman to underscore how crises serve to catalyse sharp transitions towards new political-economic orders:

"Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas lying around".

The Covid19 pandemic has all the attributes of just such a crisis but whose repercussions are global in scale and of potentially greater severity than the 1930s depression. Much has been made of the fact that the pandemic has given us time to take breath and to rebuild tourism economies along more sustainable and regenerative principles. However, the restructuring of post-pandemic tourism economies will entail much more than appeals to morality or simply for tourism to "grow back better" as proposed by the UNWTO.

To paraphrase climate activist Bill McKibben, progressive voices in tourism may have begun to win the argument but we are far from winning the struggle to catalyse the transformation towards a just, sustainable and democratically-managed tourism political economy. Further to the challenges posed by the complex structure and organisation of the tourism 'industries', without a coordinated transnational programme of action to neutralize the grip of markets and capital on tourism governance, it will be hard for states to resist commercial pressures to restore growth and profitability and to push back against corporate lobbying demanding the loosening of fiscal 'burdens' and "restrictive" social and environmental regulations.

Progress is also hindered by the lack of an agreed consensus regarding the precise form equitable and sustainable post-pandemic models of tourism might take. hese range from scattered micro-alternatives to mass tourism, modest innovations and market remedies to more radical proposals for degrowth. What many proposed solutions have in common is a disconnection from political economyand the invisibility of the contested class relations that shape and determine distributive outcomes and which are often concealed in pluralist framings of tourism political economy. The danger is that technocratic and possibly authoritarian recovery strategies will be by delivered governments and corporations merely in consultation with 'stakeholders'. The expertise of digital tech companies may also be harnessed by states to deploy data analytics and 'smart' technologies for the management of tourist mobility and border crossings in the interests of 'public safety'. Such responses promote technical solutions abstracted from politics. As such they risk accentuating an expanding architecture of corporate-managed surveillance capitalism that undermines principles and structures of democratic participation,

The precise pathways to recovery and transformation will vary according to the structure and organisation of tourism in local contexts and the changing tectonics of global macro-economic forces. The emerging landscapes of global tourism capitalism will nevertheless present considerable challenges for any kind of coordinated response from labour and civil society as renewed struggles over strategically located 'tourism assets' intensify.

There have been promising proposals ranging from localizing destination value-chains to fostering the inclusion of women in decision-making. However, a more radical shift to an equitable-green model of tourism will require a multi-scalar and robust politics of intervention that can challenge the nexus of commercial-financial-political interests who have abetted the relentless growth of tourism and expansion of capital accumulation through land grabs, privatizations, regulatory liberalization and real estate-driven strategies of tourism development. The resurgence of states as critical economic actors nevertheless provides a vital opportunity to decouple tourism development decision-making from speculative capital flows and short-term profiteering and, looking further ahead, to widen and deepen democratic-civic participation in the management and socialisation of the assets and resources upon which tourism and associated human livelihoods depend.

Raoul Bianchi is reader in International Tourism and Development, University of East London.

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COVID-19 and the prospects for the radical transformation of tourism

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TourismPostCOVID19 | Responsible Tourism Despite advances in the argument for a transformation of tourism brought about by the pandemic crisis, there is a need for a more robust, multi-scale policy of intervention to challenge the power of tourism capital. Photography by: Harare, Zimbabwe. ILO.

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As debates continue surrounding the impact of Covid-19 on global travel and tourism, this English Tourism Week, Dr Julie Scott explores how embracing uncertainty and creativity could be key to building resilience in global travel as we work towards a new 'normal' for tourism.
Travel, tourism and hospitality find themselves in the front line of the economic fall-out from Covid-19.

With 96% of all destinations world-wide introducing various levels of travel restriction, and some form of social distancing the new norm, the UNWTO expects a 20-30% fall in international tourist arrivals for 2020 (compared with 0.4% in the SARS outbreak of 2003, and 4% in 2009 on the back of the world economic crisis), wiping out the past five-to-seven years' worth of growth.

Warren Buffet's decision to pull all his firm's finances out of the big four US airlines, on the grounds that Covid-19 has ' changed the world' for the aviation industry, seems to underscore the inevitability of wholesale shrinkage in airline capacity, with the collapse of major airlines, and British Airways shedding 12,000 jobs, or 26% of its staff. Even AirBnB, that famous disruptor, is finding its business model threatened by the pandemic, with bookings reportedly down 85%, cancellation rates at around 90%, and an estimated $20-$40 billion wiped off its company value. Dramatic though these headline figures are, the impact is replicated on a smaller scale all along the complex travel and tourism value chain, and felt by the innumerable small and medium sized enterprises, which make up an estimated 80% of the sector.

In what feels like a period of unprecedented and acute uncertainty, we look for ways of reducing risk by substituting knowledge for uncertainty, and we tend to do this by extrapolating future trends from knowledge of past events.

However, an alternative approach is to recognise and understand the inevitability of uncertainty, in a world of increasing complexity and acceleration, and to seek to develop adaptive responses, with a focus on building resilience, rather than 'recovery' based on return to the status quo ante.

Scenario building is one such approach, which is gaining increasing traction in the corporate and policy-making worlds. Briefly, scenario planning involves the crafting of stories, which seek to resolve key uncertainties derived from the forces identified as driving a particular situation. The scenarios generate multiple alternative resolutions, rather than a single authoritative version. They must be plausible, and grounded in careful analysis of the driving forces and their associated uncertainties - but their main strength lies in the building of compelling narratives that explain complex relationships and imagine the impact on them of different conditions and outcomes. As such, they call for creativity and imagination, as well as knowledge and analysis.

To illustrate, here are three areas of critical uncertainty that the Covid-19 crisis has thrown into sharp relief:

Firstly, there is no V-shaped curve. In the absence of an effective vaccine, the threat of future repeat waves of infection mean that social distancing, alongside ramped up cleaning and hygiene protocols, will continue to have an impact on travel, tourism and hospitality businesses. Among other restrictions, government guidance issued in the UK this month (May 2020) for hotels and restaurants emerging from lockdown stipulates that bar areas and seated areas in cafes and restaurants must remain closed, check-in and check-out times and work shifts staggered, crowded reception areas avoided.

Airlines are debating the viability of leaving centre seats empty as a way of achieving social distancing, and the impact on demand of the 14-day quarantine period for international arrivals to the UK, announced last week. The impacts of such measures will be felt in both customer experience and prices, which will in turn affect the pattern and volume of demand, as well as the future of the workforce in the short, medium and long term. With Heathrow's Chief Executive conceding that there may now be no need for a third runway for another ten to 15 years, the industry appears to be heading for an L-shape curve unprecedented in the history of modern tourism.

The second area of uncertainty concerns the multiplicity and complexity of stakeholders and stakeholder relationships. Characterised by long, multi-sectoral supply chains, extending both globally, but also very locally, and heavily weighted towards small and medium sized businesses, but also involving government departments, international agencies, and global corporations - the scope for the interplay of human agency and ingenuity, and the challenges of coordination, leave the door wide open to surprises and unexpected consequences.

Thirdly, the conjuncture of the pandemic and the climate emergency suggest we may have reached a transformational moment, with the possibility that loss of biodiversity and human encroachment into wildlife habitats will increase the likelihood and frequency of pandemic outbreaks in the future. Will this be the new normal some voices are predicting? How will we adapt to that? What other futures might be possible? And what part will travel and tourism play?

With the development of a safe vaccine still some time off, heightened levels of uncertainty are likely to persist into the medium to long term. This suits the time frame for scenario planning, which typically works with a five to ten year horizon. Amongst the benefits reported by organisations who have used scenario planning, such as British Airways and Visit Scotland, is the way the process challenges operational ways of thinking, which assume that the future will look very much like the present.

As the industry starts to pick up the pieces and contemplate the new post-lockdown landscape, destination management organisations, businesses and local authorities - particularly in the tourism hotspots identified in our earlier research as acutely exposed by their dependency on the tourism economy - would benefit from the opportunity to reboot, to engage in fresh thinking, generate and test insights, and to stimulate organisational creativity, which will be key in building resilience to current and future shocks.
Dr Julie Scott is a Senior Researcher within the Tourism and Events Hub and a Senior Lecturer in Tourism Policy within the School of Human and Life Sciences. The Tourism and Events Hub aims to provide a clearly defined research and knowledge exchange offer to the visitor economy in Kent and beyond.

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Alternative paths to building resilience: Tourism recovery planning beyond Covid-19 | Expert comment

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As debates continue surrounding the impact of Covid-19 on global travel and tourism, this English Tourism Week, Dr Julie Scott explores how embracing uncertainty and creativity could be key to building resilience in global travel as we work towards a new 'normal' for tourism.

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HUB EXPERT COMMENT BLOG

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As the 'We're Good to Go' campaign seeks to build a 'ring of confidence' for the reopening tourism sector, and domestic visitors are encouraged to explore the best of British destinations this summer, Dr Karen Thomas, Dr Daniel O'Donoghue & Dr Julie Scott explore some of the stark realities facing businesses dependent upon international visitors and how this could impact more widely across regional economies of the UK.
Tourism and hospitality has continued to be reported as one of the sectors which have been hardest hit by the Covid-19 crisis. The easing of lockdown and the gradual reopening of many businesses at the heart of the visitor economy has been welcomed by many. A number of recent Government measures to support the sector, such as the reduced rate of VAT for hospitality, accommodation and attractions announced by the Chancellor in his Plan for Jobs, have provided a lifeline for many businesses. However, for a sector just starting to reopen mid-way through the season, most with significantly reduced capacity due to social distancing requirements, the path to recovery will be slow and, for the majority, dependent initially upon building consumer confidence amongst the domestic market. As UK consumers' sentiment to consider an international trip this year remains low, according to VisitBritain's latest Covid-19 Consumer Sentiment Tracking Survey (6-10 th July) results - hopes for the early phase of recovery for the visitor economy are pinned on the value of domestic visitors exploring their own doorsteps and rediscovering the benefits of staycations.

This domestically-led recovery path will not, however, fully counterbalance the loss in income from the steep decline in international visitors to the UK this year, and offers little security to travel organisations whose business models are dependent on the inbound market.

VisitBritain reports on the scale of the inbound market which for 2019 was 40.9 million visits to the UK, accruing a visitor spend of £28.4 billion. The revised outlook for the UK, issued in early June by VisitBritain, forecasts a drop of 59% in terms of international visits, and 63% in spend - down to £10.6 billion. This forecast assumes a low level of international travel restarting in early July, with no second wave of covid-19 or upturn in the virus that would require any new national lockdown/quarantine measures.

The stark realities of this loss of inbound tourism for tour operators and destination management companies (DMCs) has been highlighted by the results of a survey by UKinbound, the leading trade association representing the interests of the UK's inbound tourism sector. Based upon a survey of their tour operator and DMC members, the findings indicate that, without further Governmental support, 53% expect their businesses to last no more than 6 months, with 88% expecting to make between 25-100% of their workers redundant. As Joss Croft, Chief Executive of UKinbound comments, these " results unsurprisingly reinforce that those tourism businesses that rely wholly on international visitors for their livelihoods are on their knees and that the risk of widespread redundancies and the collapse of previously successful businesses is a very real threat without further Government support."

The Composite Tourism and Hospitality Index, which was developed by the Tourism and Events Hub at Canterbury Christ Church University, as part of its recent research for the UKinbound commissioned Perfect Storm report, sheds further light on the vulnerability of particular regions of the UK to a downturn in the inbound tourism market, and its potential impact on jobs. The Index pinpoints areas with higher than average concentrations of workers in travel agencies and tour operators, especially in areas which are the base for large headquarters, or close to international airports.
Read the research report, A Perfect Storm? The impact of the end of Free Movement on the UK tourism workforce . 'A Perfect Storm? The impact of the end of Free Movement on the UK tourism workforce' report was launched by in October 2019. The , at Canterbury Christ Church University was commissioned by UKinbound to undertake and deliver the research. Its report authors are Dr Karen Thomas, Dr Julie Scott, Dr Jim Butcher, Dr Daniel O'Donoghue and Dr Lorna Thomas.
However, compounding the direct impact on local labour markets as a result of significant job losses, is the indirect impact that a collapse in businesses, highly dependent on the inbound market, could have on the wider visitor economy and its supply chains. Such businesses, captured by the UKinbound survey, are instrumental in aiding the dispersal of international visitors around the regions of the UK, and play a significant role underpinning the government's Tourism Sector Deal and growing the value of tourism outside of London. Whilst the uncertainties of the Covid-19 crisis require a complex balancing of health and economic recovery, and international travel will inevitably be impacted for some time to come, nevertheless, it will be crucial to the UK's long-term recovery to maintain tourism business infrastructure and supply chains in place, ready for when international travel starts to recover in significant numbers. Whilst airlines have received significant media coverage, the UKinbound survey results shine a light on other vital sub-sectors which play a significant role in our tourism ecosystem.

Our analysis of regional tourism and hospitality workforce data identifying hotspots in key sub-sectors impacted by Covid-19, adds to the evidence that the impact of the crisis is not just playing out in the experiences of these organisations and their employees directly affected by it, but in the communities/regions that their economic viability supports and moreover, impacts the future ability for tourism to contribute to the recovery and resilience of these regions post-covid.

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Staycations alone will not save UK tourism | Expert comment

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As the 'We're Good to Go' campaign seeks to build a 'ring of confidence' for the reopening tourism sector, and domestic visitors are encouraged to explore the best of British destinations this summer, Dr Karen Thomas, Dr Daniel O'Donoghue & Dr Julie Scott explore some of the stark realities facing businesses dependent upon international visitors and how this could impact more widely across regional economies of the UK.

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IMPACT OF COVID ON REGIONAL TOURISM HOTSPOTS

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IMPACT OF COVID ON REGIONAL TOURISM HOTSPOTS

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As the UK tourism and hospitality sector gather evidence linked to the impacts of Covid-19, Dr Karen Thomas, Dr Daniel O'Donoghue & Dr Julie Scott explore how insights into localised labour markets are vital to businesses and regions lobbying for the support needed to ensure future recovery.
Tourism and hospitality is widely reported as one of the sectors which have been hardest hit by the Covid-19 crisis. Whilst the pressures of lockdown are currently devastating to these businesses, still closed at the start of the season, the mid- to long-term impact of the crisis will not just play out in the experience of these organisations and their employees, but in the communities and regions that their economic viability supports.

As the Call for Evidence on the Impact of Covid-19 on DCMS sectors has been extended until mid-June, to take into account the ' pressures of the crisis', it is vital that the industry can be supported with robust evidence to continue to reinforce the significance of the sector to the UK economy and the wide-ranging implications that the devastating impacts of Covid-19 on tourism and hospitality could have on the wider regional and sub-regional economy and growth. The light at the end of the tunnel is the belief of organisations such as the World Travel &Tourism Council (WTTC) and the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), that with the appropriate measures in place, tourism and hospitality can be a powerful catalyst to drive recovery.

The differing reliance of regions on tourism and hospitality was recently analysed and mapped by researchers from the Tourism and Events Hub, at Canterbury Christ Church University, as part of the UKinbound commissioned Perfect Storm Report. Whilst this initial analysis was undertaken to identify regions particularly vulnerable to the impact of the end of Free Movement post-Brexit, as the sector is now faced by the devastating impact of Covid-19, the relevance of this data analysis is significant from a different perspective, linking to recent news articles claiming that tourism hotspots could be set to suffer a disproportionate consequence of post-lockdown job losses.

Our Perfect Storm Report supports the picture of regional and sub-regional differences in the concentrations of tourism and hospitality employment, with some parts of the country, particularly rural areas heavily dependent on the tourism economy. Some local authority districts, especially in Scotland, Wales and the South West, show concentrations of employment in the accommodation sub-sector at over twice the national average. Our calculation and mapping of a Composite Tourism and Hospitality Index, from bespoke analysis of the ONS economic and workforce datasets (linked to four sub-sectors: accommodation; food and beverage; arts, culture, entertainment and visitor attractions; and travel agencies/tour operators), allows us to identify areas with particularly high concentrations of employment in tourism and hospitality compared to the national average. The resultant mapping of the composite score to illustrate sub-regional variations across the combined sub-sectors, is useful here to highlight those places with high levels of employment in the tourism and hospitality- related sector relative to the rest of the local economy and thus, in this context most exposed to the impact of Covid-19 on tourism and hospitality. Looking at the map of Britain, a striking pattern emerges of the clear preponderance of high scoring areas in many peripheral parts of the country, in particular, rural areas of Scotland and Northern England, Wales, and the South West of England.

If predictions are correct, that tourism and hospitality will continue to be among the hardest hit within the economy and take longer to adjust to the challenges of social distancing when the easing of the lockdown starts, due to the inherent characteristics of the tourism/hospitality experience, then areas reliant on this sector will feel the impacts more deeply in terms of their ability to recover from the crisis.

Representations to Government have already brought about welcome measures to support the sector, but trade associations and businesses are continuing to lobby for extended measures and support to safeguard the future of the tourism and hospitality sector and the critical supply chains upon which the visitor economy ecosystem is dependent.

In addition, these places are especially vulnerable, as they are not only over-represented in tourism and hospitality employment, but simultaneously hampered in achieving any more widely based recovery as they lack the resilience other places may possess from a more diverse economic base. In effect, these hotspots are likely to suffer from a 'dependency double-whammy' as a result of the Covid-19 crisis, exacerbated by other structural challenges; for example, a higher than average proportion of SMEs and micro organisations; a workforce with a higher than average reliance on part-time and non-permanent workers; and a seasonal offer.

The significance of the tourism and hospitality sector to the UK economy is often underestimated, but with approximately 3.3 million people working pre-covid in tourism-related businesses, the numbers total more than manufacturing or construction, contributing £145.9 billion to the UK economy in 2018. It is vital, therefore, that the impact of Covid-19 on the tourism and hospitality sectors is fully examined, not just in terms of the impact on individual businesses but the wide-ranging consequences on the regions which depend on this sector for growth and in order to harness the potential the sector has to support wider recovery.

Read the research report here > A Perfect Storm? The impact of the end of Free Movement on the UK tourism workforce https://www.ukinbound.org/resources/a-perfect-storm-how-ending-free-movement-will-impact-uk-tourism-full-report/
'A Perfect Storm? The impact of the end of Free Movement on the UK tourism workforce' report was launched by UKinbound in October 2019. The Tourism and Events Hub, at Canterbury Christ Church University was commissioned by UKinbound to undertake and deliver the research. Its report authors are Dr Karen Thomas, Dr Julie Scott, Dr Jim Butcher, Dr Daniel O'Donoghue and Dr Lorna Thomas - School Human and Life Sciences.

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Regional tourism hotspots and the impact of Covid-19 | Expert comment

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As the UK tourism and hospitality sector gather evidence linked to the impacts of Covid-19, Dr Karen Thomas, Dr Daniel O'Donoghue & Dr Julie Scott explore how insights into localised labour markets are vital to businesses and regions lobbying for the support needed to ensure future recovery.

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Research questions posed by Skift article

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Research questions posed by Skift article

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interesting review setting 114 questions about the future of travel following Covid-19 themed by - big picture, policy, airlines, hotels, destinations, business travel, meetings and events etc etc

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At Skift we pride ourselves at deciphering and defining the future of travel. In fact that has been our tagline for many years now. With the pandemic stopping travel of all kinds and a potential global reset of travel from here on, we have lots of questions about where our sector is going.

So we decided to write out these questions swirling around amongst the Skift team as a way to spur introspection and change in the travel sector, and kept on writing and writing these and came up with 100+ of them, 114 to be exact.

Our Skift Editorial and Research teams are in early stages of exploring these questions for the last few months through our stories and our Research Reports and these broad lines of enquiry will define our coverage of the global travel recovery in coming months and years.

In fact the answer to the hypothetical question I posed early this month " It Is April, 2025: What Would Your Letter About the Last 5 Years of Travel Say?" would in large part be determined by how the travel industry - and travelers - answer these questions below. Dig in below and send us your questions (or answers!) at 100questions@skift.com.
Big Picture Questions

1. Travel is the most consequential sector in the world, as we learned by the complete stoppage of travel over the last few months. Does it finally register to the rest of the world after, or does it become more inconsequential because people realize how they can do without it?

2. What shape will the travel economy recovery take? Will it lead or lag the general economy rebound?

3. How much of travel demand is permanently lost, versus just delayed?

4. Will the travel industry lose its hubris after a decade-long growth hangover? What does a more humble travel industry look like?

5. Will travel have its "fast fashion" moment - wherein people start to focus on the quality, not quantity, of their trips, and cut down accordingly?

6. In a world that is already seeing an alarming rise of nationalism across the globe, does a sudden suspension of international travel further poison the well? With far fewer people able to directly connect and empathize with foreign cultures does protectionism grow even faster?

7. If there's a permanent shift in working from anywhere in a large part of the working world, does the dream of digital nomads finally become a reality, and how will it benefit the business of travel?

8. Or, does the uncertainty and fear around the virus mean the myth of the "digital nomad" dies? Such nomads found themselves scattered all over the world, without being properly registered residents or paid into a public health system.

9. Will governments reduce dependence on travel? Or will they continue to put quantity over quality as measure of tourism success?

10. Does the progress in diversity efforts in the executive levels of travel companies and organizations stop as the primary motivation becomes survival?

11. Will this bring an era of big reset of labor relations in travel, across sector? Or worsen it?

12. Well this era spur automation in all parts of travel as safety and costs become paramount? Or does the opposite happen where labor is so cheap after this that it won't make much of a sense for the companies to make investments in automation?

13. Will there be a long-term labor shortage in travel, as the millions of individuals working in travel were laid off and might not come back due to the concern about volatility?

14. Will the travel sector lose a couple of years' worth of the best technical engineers graduating from schools as those young professionals prefer the perceived safety, stability, and quick rebound growth of companies in other sectors?

15. Will consumer segmentation become ever more important, because the crisis heightens the differences among different types of travelers?

16. Now that everyone is learning to bring travel to people's homes, will they learn to monetize it?

17. How will the dreaming and planning phase of travel buying cycle change? Will inspirational content play a bigger part?

18. What does customer service in travel finally, finally improve?

19. Will this phase accelerate digital transformation at large travel companies?

20. What happens to the behavior of travel loyalty program members from here, and how do the loyalty program change to cater to the changed behavior?

21. What happens to travel magazines and guidebooks, already on the decline curve? Does it accelerate the inevitable for them?

22. In the short term how will the outbreak impact the accessibility of international travel? Will it move away from being a product attainable to the masses, and become more of a premium luxury good only for the elite few?

23. How does this change the travelers/citizens' willingness to give up more personal privacy (contract tracing, immunity checks at borders) in exchange for more freedoms/assurances that their health is being protected?

24. Will the dramatic declines in carbon emissions and urban smog witnessed during the COVID-19 economic disruption lead to any meaningful changes in politicians' and consumers' attitudes towards the climate crisis? Or will all habits return to normal post-pandemic?
Policy & Seamless Travel Questions
25. Will the countries of the world get together and come up with a global passport of sorts to make sure that travel with the people who pose little health danger can travel seamlessly?

26. Do the visa regimes that have been dismantled over the last decade, through E-visa and visaless travel, get reenacted because of security and safety concerns?

27. Will industry associations see a resurgence in membership and fees because companies that are members of it see the value on lobbying with government and policymakers?

28. Will travel and tourism finally make it as policy issue and agendas of political candidates during elections around the world?
Airlines & Airports
29. How does the check-in process at airports, hotels, cruises, theme parks or any other attractions in travel change? Will it change for the worse or for better?

30. How do airlines that have restricted and constricted space for economy travelers over the years change as the need for social distancing continues for a while to come?

31. Does the era of extra fees that airlines have pioneered over the last decade go away, as people just want to focus on basic low fares for a while to come?

32. Is this finally the death of the dreaded middle seats on planes?

33. Will the cancellation policies of airlines hotels and cruises continue to be flexible forever from here on, and how long?

34. How will it affect ultra long-haul air flights, will they continue on the path as they were starting to or will that dream be put to rest?

35. Will Europe's fragmented market of airlines consolidate in a way similar to the consolidated airline market in the U.S., as weaker carriers fail, merge, or sell themselves?

36. Does the travel retail at airports benefit even more as people spend more time at airports because of the increasing checks?

37. How many air routes will get shut down forever?

38. How will airport lounges reconfigure themselves for "social distancing" and "sanitation"/cleanness? No more buffet bars? More touch-less check-in technology to replace handing over IDs or other physical items?

39. Will there be a massive competition on benefits among large-fee ($450 a year) co-branded travel loyalty credit cards as long-grounded travelers reconsider their options and what they'll pay for once travel rebounds?
Hotels/Accommodations Questions
40. Will there be a resurgence in service at hotels, something that has been on the decline for over a decade?

41. How will hotel companies that have built an expectation for direct bookings and up-front non-refundable rates adjust to a world where many travelers want flexibility until the last-minute?

42. Will a certification for the cleanliness of a hotel catch on?

43. Do mobile keys finally become a reality at hotels?

44. Does hotel F&B make a comeback as people want to stay on premises?

45. What happens to all the sub-brands that hotel chains have launched, do we finally see a shake out there?

46. What will happen to brands such as CitizenM, Jo&Joe, poshtels, etc, that encourage social interaction and co-living?

47. Will hostels prove surprisingly resilient as young people feel fearless about the pandemic and return to travel quickly?

48. Will there be a renewed interest in short term rentals because people want control over their own space? Or do they want the reliability of a hotel with enough services and hygiene?

49. Is the masterlease model dead? Alternative accommodation providers like Sonder, Lyric, and others are laying off people while struggling under the pressures of 10-year leases. Was this ever a sustainable business model, and will it survive?

50. How do the travel and hospitality and tourism programs and universities and colleges change? Will we see more students going into the programs because of a recession coming, as happens in every recession, or do less young people go into travel as a career because of the prognostications of a bleak future?

51. Will virtual education and MooC courses for hospitality have a boom as the hospitality sector worldwide needs to quickly train staff in new procedures or, post-recession, train up new workers?

52. Will more hotel owners decide to affiliate with a franchise to get under the safer umbrella of a larger brand / loyalty program?

53. Will large financial investors continue to buy hotel real estate? Does this accelerate the trend towards institutional investors (i.e. bargain-hunters swoop in) or reverse it back towards more mom-and-pop ownership (i.e. large investors burned by the asset class)?
Tourism And Destinations Questions
54. Does domestic travel really have a big surge as everybody's predicting?

55. Could an increase in local tourism help residents connect with their local history and culture, leading to a resurgence in civic price?

56. Does even domestic travel within countries get more limited as states or provinces put up more barriers to those outside its jurisdictions?

57. Do remote and rural locations get overwhelmed as that's the only place people want to travel from here on for a while to come?

58. What does happen to overtourism in cities? Will cities be the last tourism destinations to come back, if ever?

59. Will the crisis accelerate the fightback against overtourism as residents increasingly see foreigners as a health threat?

60. Will Saudi Arabia that was about to make a giant push in the global tourism scene will have any chance of opening up and people going there?

61. Will Chinese travelers remain the global force that they had become? Or do they become even more important?

62. Will trains travel (aka Amtrak) make a comeback as people develop fear of airports, flying etc?

63. Will the Great American Roadtrip make a comeback?

64. Will natural parks and destinations with grandeur see a boom in visits as housebound, anxious travelers seek a spiritual reconnection with nature and things bigger than themselves?

65. Will the travel influencers have any influence left after this? Or did they become even more important because destinations and brands need to spur demand?

66. Do DMOs and tourism boards find new ways to fund themselves beyond hotel taxes, and indeed finally see the limitation in focusing strictly on arrivals?

67. Could virtual reality start to replace real-life visits to famous landmarks? Will it get a second chance?

68. Will there be a new shuffle of popular tourism destination countries/regions? What would be the next wave?

69. Will leisure travelers require quadruple checking from multiple sources of information online before choosing places to stay? If so, will that mean that travel suppliers need to watch their social reputation more than ever? Will "social reputation monitoring" become essential rather than a "nice to have" for hotel companies and destination management organizations? Will hotels and destination managers need to over-communicate online even more vigilantly than before?
M&A Questions
70. What will be the wave of M&A happening in the travel sector, which sectors in travel will be most active?

71. Will private equity's role and sovereign wealth fund's role in travel become even more significant?

72. If the most profitable companies are ones with scale, and the giant conglomerates emerge the strongest from the crisis, how will antitrust regulators react, especially if M&A happens?

73. Will cash-strapped destinations seek to monetize access to some of their premier attractions and cultural treasures through privatization? Think of the example of how private equity firm Carlyle Group invested in 2016 in the Inca Rail line that is a crucial access point for travelers to Machu Picchu?

74. Travel will now be a debt-laden sector. Public companies have raised tens of billions of new bond issuances and large chunks of those SBA small business loans will not be forgiven. How will travel businesses manage to pay down these large burdens (if ever)?
Cruises Questions
75. Does the U.S. government's refusal to bailout cruise portend a (much needed) overhaul of how that industry is regulated in the US, where half of the industry's market lives? Will the cruise companies' business models survive this?

76. Will the diehard cruisers return back to cruises faster than we all would rationally expect?

77. Will river cruises (smaller, more spaced-out ships) rebound faster than ocean cruises if they can reconfigure themselves more quickly for new public health concerns?

78. Will the cruise industry ever be able to attract new cruisers after this?
Travel Agents/Tour Operators/Booking Questions
79. Do the travel agents that survive this have a resurgence because people have realized the value of having a human to deal with all the uncertainties of travel?

80. Or does technology finally leap forward such that the DIY really becomes possible in travel, as companies realize that tech investment is needed to deal with a huge customer service surge like happened here?

81. Does this change travel insurance forever, with clarity instead of lots of terms and conditions? Will travel insurance (and travel booking financial protection services) flourish?

82. Will the travel booking windows shrink, as we have seen early evidence in China and will this be a long term shift in behavior?

83. Will packaged travel make a come back as people want more self-contained holidays? Will all-in inclusive resorts see a resurgence for the same reason?

84. Are group tours over forever and will they give way to more solitary/DIY travel?

85. Will tour operators (and smaller airlines and online travel agencies) radically change their businesses? Will they stop using cash deposits for advance reservations to fund their daily operations? Will they instead stash deposits into a reserve account?
Business Travel Questions
86. Are we at peak business travel? Will the numbers never come back?

87. Will premium air travel be the first segment to rebound because executives and investors will be the most heavily incentivized to get back in the air to pursue their business objectives?

88. Will 'duty of care', which business travel management companies (TMCs) have long touted as an added perk they provide to corporations, prove its value during the crisis and help TMCs grow market share?

89. Does this permanently reduce or rewrite the role of the global distribution system as corporate travel may never fully recover and the airlines might be more willing to fight for newer systems as the need for better retailing strategies will only become more urgent?
Meetings & Events Questions
90. Is the era of giant conventions with acres and acres of land over forever? What will virtual look like for these conventions and trade shows?

91. What does a hybrid physical and digital conference or event look like and how do you make it interesting for everyone involved?

92. What will be the role of Convention and Visitor Bureaus going ahead in a virtual or hybrid events world?

93. What will be the role of event venues going forward? How will they adjust to the virtual or hybrid events world?

94. Will meeting planners insist contracts must include clauses on cleaning/hygiene standards?
Travel Startups Questions
95. Will venture investors turn away from funding travel startups, generally not a big area of focus anyway for VCs historically?

96. Airbnb was founded in the depths of the 2008/9 recession and tapped into a zeitgeist by offering cheap accommodations local connections. What startup will be the 'next Airbnb' to emerge from this crisis and what sector will it be in?

97. Will there be one or a few strong disruptors from outside travel emerging post crisis? Who would they be? What would they bring to travel?

98. Does the surge in venture investment in tours and activities and the sector itself that was going online so rapidly completely stop, and will it be reversible?

99. Will venture debt gain share on venture equity as a preferred investment mechanism in the next two years, as VC cash dries up? Debt may work well for startups that offer subscription software and marketplace models, where they acquire some customers, and those customers start yielding fairly consistent revenue.
Online Travel/Tech Questions
100. Do the online travel agencies get their mojo back because of abundance of inventory from suppliers?

101. Or will people want to go direct to brands because they know that's the easiest in terms of cancellations and refunds?

102. Will this phase also accelerate the consumer move to online travel/digital commerce in countries and geographies that were still skeptical?

103. What happens to Expedia and TripAdvisor from here, two of the most troubled online travel players going into this?

104. When, if ever, will Expedia and Booking return to bidding on metasearch at the same scale they were before this crisis?

105. Will Ctrip/Trip.com Group turn out to be the relatively best-capitalized conglomerate to rebound most quickly, and will it go on an investment spree? Will it take near-majority stakes in geographic markets they have yet to penetrate, copying what Ctrip/Trip.com Group has already done in India with MakeMyTrip.

106. Will Google Travel be transformed because of a falloff in advertising? Or will it gain even more importance as a semi-direct channel for brands?

107. How do travel booking intermediaries whose core product is the distribution of non-refundable rates endure in a near-term environment where travelers seek flexibility in bookings?

108. Is this the end of travel metasearch as a meaningful business model except for Google and Qunar/Skyscanner? Or will metasearch make a comeback as travelers become more price sensitive?

109. Companies are examining budgets line-by-line and cutting the fat. What travel tech platforms are actually essential, and which were just nice to have?
Luxury/Wellness Travel Questions
110. Will luxury travel be the last to come back and what shape would it take?

111. Will "hygiene" become the new "wellness"? Will we see luxury hotels and resorts and first-class airline cabins invest heavily in touchless technology, voice-activated services, and more automation?

112. Will wellness sector thrive even more? Will there be closer collaborations between hospitality and hospitals?

113. Will health or medical brands invest in travel, the way luxury watch and clothing brands have had brand extensions? Johnson & Johnson Resort Maui?

114. Does private travel for the affluent now mean private limo, to private jet to villa - a la travel in a private bubble? Will the "haves vs the have nots" take on a new meaning in travel?

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The Coming Future Of Travel, In 100 Questions

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At Skift we pride ourselves at deciphering and defining the future of travel. In fact that has been our tagline for many years now. With the pandemic stopping travel of all kinds and a potential global reset of travel from here on, we have lots of questions about where our sector is going.

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interesting links to local labour markets and tourism hotspots - regionally variability of potential impact

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People working in some of Britain's most beautiful areas will be worst hit by the expected wave of unemployment following the coronavirus pandemic, according to forecasts suggesting the economic burden of Covid-19 is set to be spread unevenly.

Workers in the tourism-driven economies of the Lake District, Cornwall and the beauty spots of Yorkshire are at the highest risk of being left jobless, according to research by the Royal Society of Arts and Manufacturing.

UK areas in which jobs are most at risk

People living in London, south-east England and the knowledge economies of Oxford and Cambridge are the least likely to lose their livelihoods, the study says.

With 80% of workers in the hotel and food industries on furlough schemes, alongside 68% of those in arts, entertainment and recreation, about a third of jobs are permanently at risk in the longer term in the tourism-reliant areas of Richmondshire, which covers much of the Yorkshire Dales, Eden, which covers part of the Lake District, and Cornwall and the west Devon coast.

Nearly 27,000 jobs are at risk in Pembrokeshire and the Cotswolds alone. Many of the areas facing the biggest job losses are in Conservative heartlands. Last week Visit Britain estimated that Covid-19 would cost the tourism industry around £15bn in 2020, with 22 million fewer visitors to the UK.

"Our analysis finds a stark geographical divide in terms of how Covid-19 could impact local labour markets with rural areas and coastal towns most at risk of high job losses," said the report's authors, Fabian Wallace-Stephens and Alan Lockey. "Many of the most vulnerable areas are located in the north and south-west of England. Cities and other urban areas tend to be at less risk, particularly in London or in its surrounding commuter belt."

The RSA found that younger workers aged 16 to 24 were more than twice as likely to be furloughed as middle-aged workers.

A separate study, also published on Monday, says black and minority ethnic citizens will find the coming economic conditions hardest to weather because they have much less money saved to fall back on.

The Runnymede trust found that for every £1 of wealth and savings held by white British citizens, Pakistani households have about 50p, black Caribbean households about 20p and black African and Bangladeshi households approximately 10p.

There is increasing evidence that black and minority ethnic people are disproportionately represented among the victims of the coronavirus, with many Asian doctors, nurses and taxi drivers among those known to have died.

"As well as the cost in life of Covid-19, economic gaps in society are being exposed and even widened, and the effects may last for a generation, affecting ethnic minorities particularly," said Omar Khan, the director of the Runnymede Trust.

"During this lockdown, children are being educated at home and some adults are working from home. Many are having to dip into savings, but little consideration is given to those who have no savings to fall back on are not able to work from home and have no IT equipment or not enough space to effectively school their children."
Topics

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UK tourism hotspots could face worst of post-lockdown job losses

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People working in some of Britain's most beautiful areas will be worst hit by the expected wave of unemployment following the coronavirus pandemic, according to forecasts suggesting the economic burden of Covid-19 is set to be spread unevenly.

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L - SHAPED RECOVERY versus V-SHAPED RECOVERY FOR AVIATION

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L - SHAPED RECOVERY versus V-SHAPED RECOVERY FOR AVIATION

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New pattern of demand might favour smaller, more fuel-efficient planes

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As it plans for a possible L-shaped recovery, with a slower rebound that does not not begin until the third or fourth quarter, JetBlue Airways is pausing aircraft cabin updates and delaying plans to expand to London. But even as it conserves cash, the airline still expects to take its first delivery of Airbus' newest narrow-body jet, the A220-300, later this year, barring last-minute changes.

It make some sense. At most airlines, the 2010s were all about aircraft size, with carriers taking a bigger-is-better mentality. They could pack in seats, lowering their unit costs, and watch their profits grow. JetBlue joined this game midway through the decade, racking up big margins with its 200-seat, all-coach Airbus A321s.

But the A220 might be the right airplane for the 2020s, at least in the early part of the decade. It is both an ultra-modern, fuel efficient jet, and on the smaller side for an aircraft with coast-to-coast range, seating 140 passengers in JetBlue's configuration. That might be a sweet-spot in a world in which fewer people fly.

"We all look at business travel, and we know it is going to take some time to come back," CEO Robin Hayes told analysts Thursday on the airline's first quarter earnings call. "An airplane like the A220 could be really helpful for that."

The L-shaped recovery that JetBlue executives anticipate is a much slower recovery, possibly in years, versus the so-called V-shaped recovery of a quick snapback, and the U-shaped recovery with a slower bottom trough and then an accelerated upswing.
Get the Latest on Coronavirus and the Travel Industry on Skift's Liveblog
Other carriers have been slightly more bullish. The discrepancy could be because JetBlue, based in New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. Covid-19 outbreak, has seen a bigger hit to its business than some competitors. JetBlue's revenues in April were down 95 percent, year-over-year, and load factors last month were less than 15 percent. JetBlue is betting it hit bottom in April, but President Joanna Geraghty said business has not improved much since.

"We envision this environment of very limited demand will continue into at least the short-, if not medium-term," she said.

Big Changes to Save Money

JetBlue is facing many of the same cash-burn challenges as its competitors. The airline burned through $18 million per day as recently as late March, but said it is now spending roughly $10 million. By July, it said it could cut burn to between $7 and $9 million per day.

It is cutting in predictable ways. The airline has grounded about 170 aircraft, a significant portion of its roughly 260-jet fleet. It also has rapidly condensed its schedule to focus on two types of flights - connecting key cities in its network, and satisfying conditions of the CARES Act, which requires airlines to fly at least a few flights a week to most cities they served before the crisis.

JetBlue has also suspended its cabin restyling program, saying it no longer makes sense to update seats and television screens amid a collapse in demand. JetBlue has completed only about half its Airbus A320s, so amore than 60 airplanes will retain an antiquated interior for awhile.

"We appreciate the related impact on customer experience, but we do not anticipate resuming our efforts until demand improves," CFO Stephen Priest said.

Then there's London. About a year ago, JetBlue announced, to great fanfare, it would begin serving Europe in 2021 with London first, followed by other European capitals.

JetBlue has postponed the plan, Hayes said, saying the airline must play "defense" by paying back debt and repairing its balance sheet before disrupting transatlantic air travel. Still, he said, London remains a priority.

"I don't want to be tone death to what's going on right now," Hayes said. "We know most of what we've got to do is play defense. We know we're going to emerge as a smaller airline. But as you ask me about London, we still see that opportunity, albeit probably shifted back a little bit in terms of time."

What Recovery Looks Like to JetBlue

As some U.S. states re-open, a few airline executives have expressed optimism that travelers soon could return in real numbers. But JetBlue executives took a more caution tone, repeatedly speaking about consumer confidence.

Like other airlines, JetBlue has already introduced several new safety measures, including blocking seats, requiring masks for passengers, and cleaning aircraft more frequently. But executives suggested it may take more to get customers to return, with Geraghty saying the industry still faces more "uncertainty."

"I think at the end of the day, recovery is going to be dependent on customers being confident ... and crew members feeling safe to work," she said.

The airline has made some assumptions about what early recovery might look like, based on experiences with Zika and civil unrest in some of its markets, Geraghty said. Historically, she said, the airline has found travelers flying to visit friends and relatives tolerate the most risk to health and safety and return first, before travelers flying for pure leisure.

JetBlue expects both groups to return before business travelers. Since about 80 percent of JetBlue's network is leisure-focused, Geraghty said it is set up well for any recovery.

The Numbers

JetBlue lost $354 million in the first quarter, a big swing from last year, when it made a $58 million profit.

Executives said the first two months of the year were strong, but the airline was crushed in March, when revenue fell 52 percent.

The current quarter likely will be worse, since JetBlue has very little revenue coming in. On the bright side, expenses should be far lower than in the first quarter.

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Why JetBlue Is Planning for an L-Shaped Recovery

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As it plans for a possible L-shaped recovery, with a slower rebound that does not not begin until the third or fourth quarter, JetBlue Airways is pausing aircraft cabin updates and delaying plans to expand to London.

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TRAVEL INDUSTRY PREDICTS MASSIVE SHAKE UP FOR YEARS TO COME

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TRAVEL INDUSTRY PREDICTS MASSIVE SHAKE UP FOR YEARS TO COME

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Fewer destinations, and an end to cheap holidays, as destinations switch from high volume to high value model

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TRAVEL INDUSTRY PREDICTS MASSIVE SHAKE UP FOR YEARS TO COME

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TRAVEL INDUSTRY PREDICTS MASSIVE SHAKE UP FOR YEARS TO COME

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Fewer destinations, and an end to cheap holidays, as destinations switch from high volume to high value model

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SKIFT FORECASTS THAT 2021 WILL BE A WRITE-OFF TOO

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SKIFT FORECASTS THAT 2021 WILL BE A WRITE-OFF TOO

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Back in the treacherous days of spring 2020, there was wishful talk of a return to travelling normalcy by the fourth quarter of this year. As the autumn begins, many prognosticators are holding out hope that the summer 2021 season will look like normal.

At the kick-off of Skift Global Forum on Monday, Pulitzer prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett had some sobering news for the travel industry: She foresees the pandemic as having a 36-month event horizon.

This, by the way, was Garrett imagining a best case scenario. "That would mean we had a vaccine that was better than 90 percent effective, safe, could be taken in a single dose, could be administered to 7 billion people worldwide with relative ease. We don't have that," Garrett told Skift CEO Rafat Ali. "None of the leading contending vaccine candidates that are in the pipelines right now ... promise to be better than 50 percent effective."

Garrett - who also formerly served as senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations - said that many of the favored interventions or touted safety precautions are also not as effective as they seem. Temperature checks, for example, don't have the efficacy they had during SARS because people tend to be most contagious with Covid-19 before they get a fever - if they show symptoms at all.

Meanwhile testing an individual right before they board a plane, or a cruise, or enter a conference wouldn't necessarily pick up infections acquired in the hours before in the airport, the hotel that morning, or even a day or two before the flight.

"You don't have sufficient either nucleic acid from the virus, you certainly aren't making antibodies yet, and your body may not even be generating the proteins yet," Garrett said, referring to the three different test types. "So it's like a false sense of security that's being put up, but you're not really measuring anything that makes sense."

So what does Garrett say the travel industry should focus on? The first one, you guessed it, is masks. "Studies show if worn properly this," putting on her mask "is 70 to 80 percent protective. Whereas if a vaccine is 50 percent protective, [that means] this [mask is] superior. At the moment this is the closest thing we've got to a vaccine."

(And by the way, she reminded, it needs to cover your nose.)

She also noted the importance of ventilation, mentioning a study in China which showed Covid was spread widely on a bus with the windows closed and the AC on, and not on one with the windows open.

"If you don't have ventilated air, fresh flushing of air through the space routinely and constantly, then that recirculation of the same particles ... those will just keep recirculating in the air over and over and eventually if you're not wearing a mask one of them is coming right in your breathing space."

She also noted the effect of alcohol in otherwise safe settings, like a beach or park. "It's the mixing of the alcohol, and the schmoozing, and the hanging out, cutting loose feeling loosey goosey - that's the problem."

Garrett also had harsh words for the cruise industry, which Monday submitted its recommendations to the CDC for how to resume sailing. She noted that cruise ships are distinctly dangerous compared to other settings, and had demonstrated "quite explosive" spread early on in the pandemic.

"I think if the cruise industry keeps trying to push the envelope and find reason to come back on board literally in this pandemic they will be doing a disservice to the whole world," Garrett said. "As painful as that is for that industry, I don't see a safe way to put people in a moving containment unit, particularly if they're going places where it's uncomfortable to leave windows open."

As for flying? "Airlines spread disease, meaning individuals get infected, they get on a plane, they go to another place and now they're passing infection to others." In other words, airlines served as a conduit, but whether or not they are actually promoting the spread of the virus within the aircraft cabin? "This is a much more controversial issue," Garrett noted, citing a CDC report which said as many as 11,000 people could've been exposed on airplanes, but it's a difficult number to confirm.

One audience member asked if Garrett would take a vaccine if one was ready in 2020. She says that no matter what the White House says, all signs point to a vaccine not being ready until 2021.

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Forget 2021 - Leading Science Writer Says Pandemic Is a 36-Month Event

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Back in the treacherous days of spring 2020, there was wishful talk of a return to travelling normalcy by the fourth quarter of this year. As the autumn begins, many prognosticators are holding out hope that the summer 2021 season will look like normal.

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Very insightful, covers all aspects of the industry: airlines, tour ops, hotels etc

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Simon Calder
Senior Travel Editor for the Independent Newspaper

Simon Calder is the Senior Travel Editor for the Independent Newspaper and one of the most recognised travel journalists in the business. Simon's career in travel started at Gatwick Airport, where he cleaned aircraft for Laker Airways and later worked as a security officer. He became The Independent's Travel Correspondent in 1994 and is known as "the Man Who Pays His Way" because he does not accept free travel facilities. He writes across the Independent titles, as well as for the Evening Standard. Simon was awarded the prestigious News Journalist of the Year in the 2017 Business Travel Journalism Awards. The prize was for an article about "callable flights", an alternative to overbooking in the wake of the notorious United Airlines incident involving Dr David Dao. The judges described it as "a creative, excellent article".

Tagged #SIMONCALDER #TRAVEL #IDEASARRIVEHERE #TOGETHERWESTAND #ONETRAVELINDUSTRY #ROADTORECOVERY #TRAVELINDUSTRY #EUROPEANTOURISM #SAVETOURISM.

World Travel Market brings the travel industry together through world leading events, content and digital tools, that make it easier for you to find personal and business opportunities and do more effective business.

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30th April - Travel Update with Simon Calder | WTM Global Hub

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Simon Calder is the Senior Travel Editor for the Independent Newspaper and one of the most recognised travel journalists in the business. Simon's career in travel started at Gatwick Airport, where he cleaned aircraft for Laker Airways and later worked as a security officer.

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LOSS OF HABITAT AND BIODIVERSITY MEANS MORE PANDEMICS INEVITABLE

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LOSS OF HABITAT AND BIODIVERSITY MEANS MORE PANDEMICS INEVITABLE

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ayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe Forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness. Mostly they shrug them off.

But in January 1996, Ebola, a deadly virus then barely known to humans, unexpectedly spilled out of the forest in a wave of small epidemics. The disease killed 21 of 37 villagers who were reported to have been infected, including a number who had carried, skinned, chopped or eaten a chimpanzee from the nearby forest.

I travelled to Mayibout 2 in 2004 to investigate why deadly diseases new to humans were emerging from biodiversity "hotspots" such as tropical rainforests and bushmeat markets in African and Asian cities.

It took a day by canoe and then many hours along degraded forest logging roads, passing Baka villages and a small goldmine, to reach the village. There, I found traumatised people still fearful that the deadly virus, which kills up to 90% of the people it infects, would return.

Villagers told me how children had gone into the forest with dogs that had killed the chimp. They said that everyone who cooked or ate it got a terrible fever within a few hours. Some died immediately, while others were taken down the river to hospital. A few, like Nesto Bematsick, recovered. "We used to love the forest, now we fear it," he told me. Many of Bematsick's family members died.

Only a decade or two ago it was widely thought that tropical forests and intact natural environments teeming with exotic wildlife threatened humans by harbouring the viruses and pathogens that lead to new diseases in humans such as Ebola, HIV and dengue.

But a number of researchers today think that it is actually humanity's destruction of biodiversity that creates the conditions for new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19, the viral disease that emerged in China in December 2019, to arise - with profound health and economic impacts in rich and poor countries alike. In fact, a new discipline, planetary health, is emerging that focuses on the increasingly visible connections between the wellbeing of humans, other living things and entire ecosystems.

Is it possible, then, that it was human activity, such as road building, mining, hunting and logging, that triggered the Ebola epidemics in Mayibout 2 and elsewhere in the 1990s and that is unleashing new terrors today?

"We invade tropical forests and other wild landscapes, which harbour so many species of animals and plants - and within those creatures, so many unknown viruses," David Quammen, author of Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Pandemic, recently wrote in the New York Times. "We cut the trees; we kill the animals or cage them and send them to markets. We disrupt ecosystems, and we shake viruses loose from their natural hosts. When that happens, they need a new host. Often, we are it."

Research suggests that outbreaks of animal-borne and other infectious diseases such as Ebola, Sars, bird flu and now Covid-19, caused by a novel coronavirus, are on the rise. Pathogens are crossing from animals to humans, and many are able to spread quickly to new places. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that three-quarters of new or emerging diseases that infect humans originate in animals.

Some, like rabies and plague, crossed from animals centuries ago. Others, such as Marburg, which is thought to be transmitted by bats, are still rare. A few, like Covid-19, which emerged last year in Wuhan, China, and Mers, which is linked to camels in the Middle East, are new to humans and spreading globally.

Other diseases that have crossed into humans include Lassa fever, which was first identified in 1969 in Nigeria; Nipah from Malaysia; and Sars from China, which killed more than 700 people and travelled to 30 countries in 2002-03. Some, like Zika and West Nile virus, which emerged in Africa, have mutated and become established on other continents.

Kate Jones, chair of ecology and biodiversity at UCL, calls emerging animal-borne infectious diseases an "increasing and very significant threat to global health, security and economies".

In 2008, Jones and a team of researchers identified 335 diseases that emerged between 1960 and 2004, at least 60% of which came from animals.

Increasingly, says Jones, these zoonotic diseases are linked to environmental change and human behaviour. The disruption of pristine forests driven by logging, mining, road building through remote places, rapid urbanisation and population growth is bringing people into closer contact with animal species they may never have been near before, she says.

The resulting transmission of disease from wildlife to humans, she says, is now "a hidden cost of human economic development. There are just so many more of us, in every environment. We are going into largely undisturbed places and being exposed more and more. We are creating habitats where viruses are transmitted more easily, and then we are surprised that we have new ones."

Jones studies how changes in land use contribute to the risk. "We are researching how species in degraded habitats are likely to carry more viruses which can infect humans," she says. "Simpler systems get an amplification effect. Destroy landscapes, and the species you are left with are the ones humans get the diseases from."

"There are countless pathogens out there continuing to evolve which at some point could pose a threat to humans," says Eric Fevre, chair of veterinary infectious diseases at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Infection and Global Health. "The risk [of pathogens jumping from animals to humans] has always been there."

The difference between now and a few decades ago, Fevre says, is that diseases are likely to spring up in both urban and natural environments. "We have created densely packed populations where alongside us are bats and rodents and birds, pets and other living things. That creates intense interaction and opportunities for things to move from species to species," he says.

"Pathogens do not respect species boundaries," says disease ecologist Thomas Gillespie, an associate professor in Emory University's department of environmental sciences, who studies how shrinking natural habitats and changing behaviour add to the risk of diseases spilling over from animals to humans.

"I am not at all surprised about the coronavirus outbreak," he says. "The majority of pathogens are still to be discovered. We are at the very tip of the iceberg."

Humans, says Gillespie, are creating the conditions for the spread of diseases by reducing the natural barriers between host animals - in which the virus is naturally circulating - and themselves. "We fully expect the arrival of pandemic influenza; we can expect large-scale human mortalities; we can expect other pathogens with other impacts. A disease like Ebola is not easily spread. But something with a mortality rate of Ebola spread by something like measles would be catastrophic," Gillespie says.

Wildlife everywhere is being put under more stress, he says. "Major landscape changes are causing animals to lose habitats, which means species become crowded together and also come into greater contact with humans. Species that survive change are now moving and mixing with different animals and with humans."

Gillespie sees this in the US, where suburbs fragment forests and raise the risk of humans contracting Lyme disease. "Altering the ecosystem affects the complex cycle of the Lyme pathogen. People living close by are more likely to get bitten by a tick carrying Lyme bacteria," he says.

Yet human health research seldom considers the surrounding natural ecosystems, says Richard Ostfeld, distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. He and others are developing the emerging discipline of planetary health, which looks at the links between human and ecosystem health.

"There's misapprehension among scientists and the public that natural ecosystems are the source of threats to ourselves. It's a mistake. Nature poses threats, it is true, but it's human activities that do the real damage. The health risks in a natural environment can be made much worse when we interfere with it," he says.

Ostfeld points to rats and bats, which are strongly linked with the direct and indirect spread of zoonotic diseases. "Rodents and some bats thrive when we disrupt natural habitats. They are the most likely to promote transmissions [of pathogens]. The more we disturb the forests and habitats the more danger we are in," he says.

Felicia Keesing, professor of biology at Bard College, New York, studies how environmental changes influence the probability that humans will be exposed to infectious diseases. "When we erode biodiversity, we see a proliferation of the species most likely to transmit new diseases to us, but there's also good evidence that those same species are the best hosts for existing diseases," she wrote in an email to Ensia, the nonprofit media outlet that reports on our changing planet.

Disease ecologists argue that viruses and other pathogens are also likely to move from animals to humans in the many informal markets that have sprung up to provide fresh meat to fast-growing urban populations around the world. Here, animals are slaughtered, cut up and sold on the spot.

The "wet market" (one that sells fresh produce and meat) in Wuhan, thought by the Chinese government to be the starting point of the current Covid-19 pandemic, was known to sell numerous wild animals, including live wolf pups, salamanders, crocodiles, scorpions, rats, squirrels, foxes, civets and turtles.

Equally, urban markets in west and central Africa sell monkeys, bats, rats, and dozens of species of bird, mammal, insect and rodent slaughtered and sold close to open refuse dumps and with no drainage.

"Wet markets make a perfect storm for cross-species transmission of pathogens," says Gillespie. "Whenever you have novel interactions with a range of species in one place, whether that is in a natural environment like a forest or a wet market, you can have a spillover event."

The Wuhan market, along with others that sell live animals, has been shut by the Chinese authorities, and last month Beijing outlawed the trading and eating of wild animals except for fish and seafood. But bans on live animals being sold in urban areas or informal markets are not the answer, say some scientists.

"The wet market in Lagos is notorious. It's like a nuclear bomb waiting to happen. But it's not fair to demonise places which do not have fridges. These traditional markets provide much of the food for Africa and Asia," says Jones.

"These markets are essential sources of food for hundreds of millions of poor people, and getting rid of them is impossible," says Delia Grace, a senior epidemiologist and veterinarian with the International Livestock Research Institute, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya. She argues that bans force traders underground, where they may pay less attention to hygiene.

Fevre and colleague Cecilia Tacoli, principal researcher in the human settlements research group at the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED), argue in a blog post that rather than pointing the finger at wet markets, we should look at the burgeoning trade in wild animals.

"It is wild animals rather than farmed animals that are the natural hosts of many viruses," they write. "Wet markets are considered part of the informal food trade that is often blamed for contributing to spreading disease. But ... evidence shows the link between informal markets and disease is not always so clear cut."

So what, if anything, can we do about all of this?

Jones says that change must come from both rich and poor societies. Demand for wood, minerals and resources from the global north leads to the degraded landscapes and ecological disruption that drives disease, she says. "We must think about global biosecurity, find the weak points and bolster the provision of health care in developing countries. Otherwise we can expect more of the same," she adds.

"The risks are greater now. They were always present and have been there for generations. It is our interactions with that risk which must be changed," says Brian Bird, a research virologist at the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine One Health Institute, where he leads Ebola-related surveillance activities in Sierra Leone and elsewhere.

"We are in an era now of chronic emergency," Bird says. "Diseases are more likely to travel further and faster than before, which means we must be faster in our responses. It needs investments, change in human behaviour, and it means we must listen to people at community levels."

Getting the message about pathogens and disease to hunters, loggers, market traders and consumers is key, Bird says. "These spillovers start with one or two people. The solutions start with education and awareness. We must make people aware things are different now. I have learned from working in Sierra Leone with Ebola-affected people that local communities have the hunger and desire to have information," he says. "They want to know what to do. They want to learn."

Fevre and Tacoli advocate rethinking urban infrastructure, particularly within low-income and informal settlements. "Short-term efforts are focused on containing the spread of infection," they write. "The longer term - given that new infectious diseases will likely continue to spread rapidly into and within cities - calls for an overhaul of current approaches to urban planning and development."

The bottom line, Bird says, is to be prepared. "We can't predict where the next pandemic will come from, so we need mitigation plans to take into account the worst possible scenarios," he says. "The only certain thing is that the next one will certainly come."

This piece is jointly published with Ensia

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'Tip of the iceberg': is our destruction of nature responsible for Covid-19?

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ayibout 2 is not a healthy place. The 150 or so people who live in the village, which sits on the south bank of the Ivindo River, deep in the great Minkebe Forest in northern Gabon, are used to occasional bouts of diseases such as malaria, dengue, yellow fever and sleeping sickness.

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17% CARBON EMISSIONS DROP DURING COVID 19

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17% CARBON EMISSIONS DROP DURING COVID 19

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The global COVID-19 quarantine has meant less air pollution in cities and clearer skies. Animals are strolling through public spaces, and sound pollution has diminished, allowing us to hear the birds sing.

But these relatively small and temporary changes should not be mistaken for the COVID-19 pandemic actually helping to fix climate change. Quite the contrary: the pandemic that made the world stop offers a glimpse of the deep changes in lifestyles and economic structures that we need to implement if we are to effectively mitigate the worst of climate change.

The short-term effects are not in doubt. A new study in Nature Climate Change led by scientists from the University of East Anglia and Stanford has found that daily global CO₂ emissions in early April 2020 were down 17% compared to the mean level of emissions in 2019.

This finding backs up an earlier report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) which found that CO₂ emissions from fossil fuel combustion - globally, the main source of greenhouse gas emissions - in the first three months of 2020 were 5% lower compared to the same period last year.

But the short-term and long-term effects of pollution are different things, and a few months without driving or flying will do little in the long run. Climate change is caused by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Quarantine measures have affected emissions of these gases in the short term, and many places have seen a drop in air pollution. But these measures were not enough to curb the overall concentration in the atmosphere, which is still increasing. Why? Because molecules of these gases stay in the atmosphere for a long time: methane for around 12 years, for instance, and carbon dioxide for up to 200 years.

Emissions declined, but it won't last

The new Nature climate change study predicts that if some restrictions are kept throughout the whole of 2020 annual emissions reductions would reach 7.5%.

This would, in theory, be great news for the environment, especially if we could maintain it for years to come. After all, in order to meet the Paris Agreement target of limiting global warming to 1.5℃, we need to reduce global CO₂ emissions by 7.6% per year between 2020 and 2030.

But this level of emissions reduction will not last unless economic activity remains depressed. And as lockdowns end and people return to work, emissions will inevitably rise once again - this happens as activity resumes after every economic downturn, including the financial crisis of 2008.

Keeping economic activity depressed to April 2020 levels is not a feasible long-term strategy. But we could use this opportunity productively to steer our societies towards a new paradigm that truly addresses the core issue of the climate conundrum.

We need to restructure our economies

Fossil fuels are the basis of our economies. Our energy systems are built around them and surprisingly little has changed since the first oil shocks in 1973. Back then, coal, oil and gas accounted for 87% of the world's total primary energy supply, while in 2017 these fossil fuels still accounted for 81%. Over that same period, the total amount of energy supplied more than doubled.

science photo / shutterstock

Yes, there is lots of new renewable energy, but this has been deployed alongside fossil fuels, rather than replacing them. All over the globe, there are still plans to build new coal-fired power plants and oil & gas infrastructure. Even countries like Norway, where fossil fuels count for only about 30% of the total energy supply and almost all electricity comes from hydropower, still often rely heavily on fossil fuel profits to fund welfare systems and pension schemes.

If we are to truly progress towards a low carbon economy, we must address the roots of the problem. For instance, how can we encourage further divestment from fossil fuels if the sector is still among the most secure and profitable investments? Or how can we build clean energy systems if we keep subsidising fossil fuels? Despite promises to phase out these tax breaks and other incentives, the richer G20 countries still provided US$127 billion in subsidies to coal, oil and gas in 2017 (remarkably, that figure excludes Saudi Arabia).

And how can we resume activity without "going back to normal"? We need long-term recovery strategies that value nature as the overarching framework within which we all exist, not a mere economic resource. To date, several post-pandemic recovery plans include generous help to the fossil fuel sector with no strings attached.

The pandemic is no climate change panacea. We now know that we can act collectively and adopt measures that significantly curb emissions - in the short term at least. But long-term change does not come about directly as a result of a crisis, but from consistent action changing what caused the crisis in the first place. The COVID-19 pandemic is only a wake-up call: we still have a lot of work to do.

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Why a 17% emissions drop does not mean we are addressing climate change

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The global COVID-19 quarantine has meant less air pollution in cities and clearer skies. Animals are strolling through public spaces, and sound pollution has diminished, allowing us to hear the birds sing. But these relatively small and temporary changes should not be mistaken for the COVID-19 pandemic actually helping to fix climate change.

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The European commission has put down a marker for the world with its green recovery package. It sets a high standard for other nations, using the rebuilding of coronavirus-ravaged economies to tackle the even greater threat of the climate emergency, in principle at least.

With the world fast approaching the point when climate chaos becomes inevitable, how the trillions of recovery dollars - or euros - are spent is a use-it-or-lose-it moment, so what the EU does really matters. Climate change is a global crisis, meaning all nations must act and some must lead the way.

Under Donald Trump, the US is slashing green protections while the biggest polluter, China, is sending mixed messages by backing coal power stations as part of its recovery. The UK, host of the next critical UN summit, has been all but silent.

The EU's plan seeks to pour money into emissions-busting sectors: €91bn (£81bn) a year for home energy efficiency and green heating, €25bn of renewable energy, and €20bn for clean cars over two years, plus 2m charging points in five years. Up to €60bn will go to zero-emissions trains and the production of 1m tonnes of clean hydrogen is planned.

A charging point for electric cars in Gdansk, Poland. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty

At least a million green jobs will be created, with workers in polluting industries helped into new roles, a critical part of the plan. Increasing the Just Transition Fund more than fivefold to €40bn minimises the risk of protests against green measures, especially in states with the heaviest coal use such as Poland, Germany and Romania, which will be among the biggest recipients. This is politically necessary, despite investment in the green economy already being a no-brainer.

The EU plan may even have a direct impact on the rest of the world, with a border tax on carbon-intensive industrial imports from other nations potentially raising up to €14bn.

But despite the European commission saying "public investments in the recovery should respect the green oath to 'do no harm'", critics worry there are no hard guarantees against the money seeping into dirty projects. The Covid-19 crisis has seen polluters lobbying hard for bailouts.

The Just Transition Fund will be routed through the European Investment Bank, but campaigners say its climate criteria allow the backing of gas projects that would lock in emissions for years. Another key fund, the €150bn React EU programme, allows member states to decide how to spend the money - most of the almost €2tn in coronavirus rescue funds spent by EU nations so far has had no green guarantees.

Worse, say critics, climate conditions on large parts of the main EU budget have been lifted for three years because of the pandemic. The proportion of the budget reserved for climate projects remains stuck at 25%, despite demands by the European parliament and many others to raise it.

The commission rejects these criticisms, saying the "objective of the green economy is present throughout the whole management of the funds". Whether this oversight proves effective will be the critical test.

Nonetheless, green-leaning business and investor groups have welcomed the recovery package, calling it bold and substantive. To turn it into reality, there will now be weeks of wrangling between EU countries to finalise the deal.

We must hope that they, and the rest of the world's nations, in turn, bear in mind the words of the EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen: "Sooner or later we will find a vaccine for the coronavirus. But there is no vaccine for climate change. Therefore [we] need a recovery plan designed for the future."

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EU green recovery package sets a marker for the world

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The European commission has put down a marker for the world with its green recovery package. It sets a high standard for other nations, using the rebuilding of coronavirus-ravaged economies to tackle the even greater threat of the climate emergency, in principle at least.

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JANE GOODALL ON ROLE OF INTENSIVE FARMING IN CREATING PANDEMICS

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JANE GOODALL ON ROLE OF INTENSIVE FARMING IN CREATING PANDEMICS

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Humanity will be "finished" if we fail to drastically change our food systems in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis, the prominent naturalist Jane Goodall has warned.

She blamed the emergence of Covid-19 on the over-exploitation of the natural world, which has seen forests cut down, species made extinct and natural habitats destroyed. The coronavirus is thought to have made the jump from animals to humans late last year, possibly originating in a meat market in Wuhan, China.

Intensive farming was also creating a reservoir of animal diseases that would spill over and hurt human society, said Goodall, one of the world's foremost experts on chimpanzees and a longtime conservation campaigner, speaking alongside two European commissioners at an online event held by the campaigning group Compassion in World Farming, on Tuesday.

"We have brought this on ourselves because of our absolute disrespect for animals and the environment," she said. "Our disrespect for wild animals and our disrespect for farmed animals has created this situation where disease can spill over to infect human beings."

People must move away from factory farming and stop destroying natural habitats as a matter of urgency, she said, because of the threat of diseases and of climate breakdown. Factory farming is linked to the rise of antibiotic resistant superbugs, which threaten human health.

"If we do not do things differently, we are finished," she said. "We can't go on very much longer like this."

She called for people to be lifted out of poverty, pointing to its strong impact on the natural world, as people with no alternatives and who are desperate to feed their families will cut down forests to survive, and in urban areas will choose the cheapest food whatever the harm caused by its production, because they have little other choice.

War and violence also fuelled the destruction of nature, she warned, and so did our overweening consumerism and urge for "stuff that we accumulate", as well as our diets.

The wealthy should put pressure on leaders and take care over what they buy to avoid adding to the problem, she said. "We have got to stop buying their products," she said, of companies that use factory farming and exploit nature.

"We have come to a turning point in our relationship with the natural world," she warned, saying there was only a small window of opportunity to make drastic changes before facing disaster. "One of the lessons learnt from this crisis is that we must change our ways. Scientists warn that to avoid future crises, we must drastically change our diets and move to plant-rich foods. For the sake of the animals, planet and the health of our children."

Stella Kyriakides, the EU's commissioner for health and food safety, said the EU was responding to concerns through its newly unveiled agriculture and biodiversity strategies and the European Green Deal. These strategies would cut the use of pesticides and encourage biodiversity, she said.

"Highly intensive farming systems have created an abundance of food but in Europe, at least, there is also significant waste and at times animal suffering," she told the conference. "These phenomena deeply worry me. The parts that don't work are ethically questionable and socially and environmentally unacceptable. Our citizens expect more and we will deliver a better balance to ensure farming practices are sustainable and food is affordable."

Janusz Wojciechowski, commissioner for agriculture, added: "We will constantly support sustainable farming and breeding practices as an alternative to intensive industrial farming."

Concern about the links between coronavirus and the exploitation of the natural world is growing. Eighteen conservation groups have joined together in the Campaign to End Wildlife Trading, which is urging Boris Johnson to call for a global wildlife trade ban when the G20 leaders meet this November.

The groups say that such a ban is needed to end the exploitation of wildlife for traditional medicine, exotic pets, tourism and other purposes. Currently, the trade in some endangered species is banned but still rife. It is one of the biggest forms of illegal trafficking in the world, after people and drugs. The legal trade is estimated to be worth $7bn to $23bn a year, according to the campaign.

Intensive farming's links to disease outbreaks were examined by the FAIRR global investor network in a new report, which found that more than 70% of the biggest meat, fish and dairy producers were in danger of fostering future zoonotic pandemics owing to lax safety standards, closely confined animals and the overuse of antibiotics.

Meat companies have been under pressure in the US, where the spread of Covid-19 has led to plant closures and disruption of the supply chain. In the longer term, according to FAIRR, the meat supply chain is likely to come under further pressure because of increased scrutiny and regulation needed to improve biosecurity.

Jeremy Coller, founder of FAIRR and CIO of Coller Capital, said: "Factory farming is both vulnerable to pandemics and guilty of creating them. It's a self-sabotaging cycle that destroys value and risks lives. To avoid causing the next pandemic, the meat industry must tackle lax safety standards for food and workers alike, closely confined animals, and overused antibiotics. Covid could be the straw that breaks the meat industry's back."
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Jane Goodall: humanity is finished if it fails to adapt after Covid-19

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Humanity will be "finished" if we fail to drastically change our food systems in response to the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis, the prominent naturalist Jane Goodall has warned. She blamed the emergence of Covid-19 on the over-exploitation of the natural world, which has seen forests cut down, species made extinct and natural habitats destroyed.

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Explains role of humans in spreading zoonotic diseases

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Explains role of humans in spreading zoonotic diseases

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Working Group on Zoonotic Diseases

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1. To promote integrative studies on zoonotic diseases among scientists of different disciplines, so as to reveal the transmission pattern and dynamic of key zoonotic diseases which is imposing high threat to humans.

2. To training young scientists and students in field of zoonotic diseases

3. To provide advices or knowledge to governments and the public for disease prevention and control

Contact:

For a regular update, please send an email to the following email ID with your name and affiliation.
zoonoticdiseases[at]iubs.org Acknowledgements:
Help in proposal drafting: L S Shashidhara, Nathalie Fomproix

Help in proposal development: Rodolfo Dirzo

Concept note: Guha Dharmarajan, Savannah River Ecology Lab, University of Georgia, USA

Logo design: Saubhik Sarkar, Shivani Krishan and Imroze Khan of Ashoka University, India

Co-Chairs:

Members:

Rodolfo Dirzo, Department of Biology, Stanford University, USA

Elizabeth Hadly, Stanford University, USA

Uma Ramakrishshnan, National Center of Biological Sciences, India

Nils Christian Stenseth, University of Oslo, Norway

Gonzalo Vogel, Centro de Investigación en Sustentabilidad (CIS), Facultad de Ciencias de la Vida, Universidad Andrés Bello

Zoonotic disease is an old, but persistent, vividly modern problem to humanity. Historically, zoonotic diseases such as plague, rabies, influenza, to name but a few, have caused huge damage to the public health around the world. In the modern era of the new century, we are facing more challenge of zoonotic diseases. Indeed, just during the past two decades, we have experienced two pandemics (H1N1, 2009; COVID-19, 2019-2020) and several major epidemics such as SARS (2002-2003), MERS (2012), Zika (2007, 2013-2014), Ebola (2014) and plague (2017). Besides, many other zoonotic diseases such as Lyme, Hanta fever, Dengue have irrupted frequently in many countries or regions.

Zoonotic diseases are maladies shared by both human and animals (both wild and domestic). The diseases can be virus, bacterium or a host of many other parasites. Both human and animals can be natural reservoir of these pathogens, which circulate between people and animals. Some pathogens need to complete their life span in several animal hosts, or need ectoparasitic vectors (e.g. fleas, mites, ticks) to spread from host to host. Some other pathogens spread via air droplet, feces or soil (e.g. influenza, Hanta fever).

Coevolution may play a significant role in the origin of zoonotic diseases in humans and animals (Kaján et al 2019). By about 10,000 years ago, domestication of animals for pets or food or laboring significantly increased the probability of cross infections of zoonotic diseases, and promoted coevolution of humans, animals and pathogens. During the arm race between pathogen and hosts, emerging or reemerging contagious agent would appear and cause an epidemic or even a pandemic to humans (Morand et al. 1996).

Increasingly, more and more studies show that humans are important factors in affecting the prevalence of zoonotic diseases (Loh et al. 2015) and zoonotic risk. Land use by humans for urbanization, agricultural use and road construction is an important driver of many zoonotic disease outbreaks (Patz et al. 2004). Due to habitat destruction which result in local decline of large animals but increase of small animals such as rodents and then zoonotic diseases (Dirzo et al 2014). Land use and defaunation frequently result in replacement of wild animals (e.g. rodents) with domestic animals, which increases the contact between pathogens and domestic animals or small animals, thus increasing the probability of contact of pathogens and people (Young et al. 2014). Notably, illegal hunting and trade of animals or animal products remain being an increasing clandestine activity that strongly facilitates disease transmission risks from animals to humans (Young et al. 2016).

Climate factors may also play a significant role in the prevalence of zoonotic diseases. Many studies have demonstrated that favorable climate would increase the food resources and then increase the abundance of animal hosts and then the zoonotic diseases (e.g. plague, Lymes, Hanta fever) (Stenseth et al 2006, Hjelle & Glass. 2000, Ostfeld et al 2006, Xu et al 2011). Besides, climate change will alter the distribution of animal hosts and, thus, alter disease risk at different climate zones. Seasonality-driven climate would cause cyclic migration of animals which attribute to seasonal epidemic of many diseases such as influenza (Olsen et al., 2006).

The understanding and the way such understanding may lead society to prepare and deal with future zoonotic disease outbreaks demand scientific collaborative research on a host of disciplines. Therefore, adopting an integrative, multi-disciplinary approach involving multiple life sciences such as zoology, ecology, epidemiology, molecular biology, climate change biology, environmental biology is necessary to inform the policy making realm. To this end, international entities become crucial in coordinating global efforts. Similarly, governments and academic institutions around the globe need to value the efforts undertaken by such bodies and strengthen them going forward. For example, under the support by IUBS, infectious diseases have been explored in the scientific program of Biological Consequences and Global Change (BCGC), mostly through modeling approaches. However, we insist, it is crucial that zoonotic diseases are investigated in a coordinated, integrative way beyond the evidently essential medical perspective, bringing on board the ecological perspective, that is, linking humans, animals, pathogens, ecosystems and global environmental change - including Anthropogenically driven climate and biodiversity change. In this direction, IUBS has established a working group and an international scientific program on zoonotic diseases by bringing scientists and experts from all over the world.
More details soon...

Dirzo, R., Young, H.S., Balle, G. Ceballos, C., Galetti, M., B. Collen. 2014. Defaunation in the Anthropocene. Science 345: 401-406.

Hjelle, B. & Glass, G.E. 2000. Outbreak of hantavirus infection in the Four Corners region of the United States in the wake of the 1997-1998 El Nino-Southern Oscillation. The Journal of Infectious Diseases, 181, 1569-1573.

Kaján GL, Doszpoly A, Tarján ZL, Vidovszky MZ,· Papp T, Coevolution with a focus on animal and human DNA viruses. Journal of Molecular Evolution 88(Pt 1), DOI: 10.1007/s00239-019-09913-4.

Loh, E. H., C. Zambrana-Torrelio, K. J. Olival, T. L. Bogich, C. K. Johnson, J. A. Mazet, W. Karesh, and P. Daszak. 2015. Targeting transmission pathways for emerging zoonotic disease surveillance and control. Vector Borne Zoonotic Dis 15:432-437.

Morand S, Manning SD, Woolhouse MEJ. 1996. Parasite-host coevolution and geographic patterns of parasite infectivity and host susceptibility. Proc R Soc Lond B 263: 119-128

Olsen, B., Munster, V. J., Wallensten, A., Waldenstrom, J., Osterhaus, A. D. M. E., & Fouchier, R. A. M. (2006). Global patterns of influenza A virus in wild birds. Science, 312(5772), 384-388. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1122438

Ostfeld RS, Canham CD, Oggenfuss K, Winchcombe RJ, Keesing F 2006 Climate, deer, rodents, and acorns as determinants of variation in Lyme-disease risk. PLoS Biol 4(6): e145. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0040145

Patz JA, Daszak P, Tabor GM, Aguirre AA, Pearl M, Epstein J, Wolfe ND, Kilpatrick AM, Foufopoulos J, Molyneux D, Bradley DJ, and Members of the Working Group on Land Use Change and Disease Emergence, 2004, Unhealthy landscapes: policy recommendations on land use change and infectious disease emergence. Environmental Health Perspectives, 112(10): 1092-1098.

Stenseth NC, et al. 2006 Plague dynamics are driven by climate variation. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 103(35):13110-13115.

Xu L, et al. 2011 Nonlinear effect of climate on plague during the third pandemic in China. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 108(25):10214-10219.

Young, H.S., Dirzo, R., Helgen, K.M., McCauley, D.J., Billeter, S. Kosoy,

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To promote integrative studies on zoonotic diseases among scientists of different disciplines, so as to reveal the transmission pattern and dynamic of key zoonotic diseases which is imposing high threat to humans.

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Impact on viability of airline business

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September 2020

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Environmental economists argue that support for airlines should be conditional on making sustainability improvements.

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For airlines, the reckoning is no longer far away on the horizon. It's now a jumbo jet meters from the runway, landing gear down. Without a sizeable external cash injection, many international airlines will follow Virgin Australia into insolvency within months, if not weeks.

Should governments bail airlines out? And if so, should any conditions be imposed, particularly in a world that requires rapid progress to net-zero emissions?

The uncertainty of COVID-19 and a pancession (pandemic-induced recession) of unknown duration, has meant the short-term bankruptcy risk for many airlines is at an all-time high. It is becoming increasingly difficult for airlines and aerospace players to source finance through traditional private debt and equity pathways. But underlying this are some salient truths. Many countries see mobility, airline jobs and a competitive aerospace sector as non-negotiables - and will do all they can to prevent the loss of a major airline.

However, airline bailouts are an inefficient use of taxpayer money at a time when fiscal recovery (stimulus) spending is sorely needed.

We recently surveyed 231 leading economists (from 53 countries) including senior finance ministry and central bank officials, for a new Oxford Review of Economic Policy paper, and asked them about 25 different stimulus policies. We found that airline bailouts have the lowest perceived economic payoff and the lowest overall desirability. Conceivably these policymakers were put off by the industry's carbon emissions and perceptions of history repeating itself. In this vein, governments want to avoid setting a precedent for future crises - that is, they hope to encourage responsible behaviour by the industry. Any airline bailout clearly should require a quid pro quo.

Making bailouts sustainable

The solution is simple: any airline bailout should include conditions that the airline reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, with interim targets and a plan to deliver. If airlines fail to meet these conditions, or any number of intermediate climate-related targets, bailout funding would be converted to equity so that the taxpayer could own a stake.

In this way, airline executives and shareholders would have strong financial incentives to meet carbon reduction targets, governments would improve their progress to meeting international climate commitments, and the world would benefit from slowed global warming.

Jaromir Chalabala / shutterstock

Green bailout conditions should allow for strong ambitions - such as airlines reaching 30% sustainable fuel use by 2030 - without prescribing solutions. Governments must empower airlines to develop their own pathways for carbon reduction, providing the freedom to business to determine the most cost-effective decarbonisation choices.

Even airlines which are not bailed out need to do better on sustainability. The current global agreement, CORSIA, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, requires airlines to offset all growth in emissions from 2020 onwards. This is a good start, but it is far from enough to reach net zero in three decades time.

Yet, as a result of the huge reduction in air travel, the global airlines trade association, IATA, has implied that the climate emergency should be deprioritised to allow for COVID-19 recovery, citing " inappropriate economic burden ". Maybe a realistic compromise would be to cut the airlines some slack in the short term, perhaps using the average of 2017-2020 emissions as the baseline (rather than 2020 alone) - the extra two years would reduce the effect of the crisis.

However, we can and should ask much more of the industry in the medium and long term - nothing less than a collective net zero target is required.

Achieving net zero

The concept of net zero aviation is not far-fetched. Qantas, IAG and Etihad have already committed to reaching it by 2050 while Finnair believes it can do it by 2045. How? Through alternative power, efficiency opportunities and direct carbon offsets.

Jet fuel and aviation gas have almost-exclusively powered jet turbine and propeller planes since the second world war. Biofuels were first approved for commercial airliner use in 2011 and though they remain much more expensive, production efficiencies are reducing prices, as might emerging algae and sugarcane-based technologies.

Battery-powered flight is no longer science fiction. In 2019, the world's first fully electric commercial plane was unveiled at the Paris Air Show. Projections suggest that such aircraft could become a staple of short-range travel by 2035.

New zero-carbon fuels hold great promise. Both hydrogen and ammonia can be produced efficiently from air, water and renewable energy. Synthetic kerosene (made from renewable hydrogen and CO2 captured from the air) is another route that is being explored. All of these rely upon renewable energy, which is getting cheaper every year.

There are other options. More efficient flight planning and plane design can help. Reduced airport taxiing, idling and longer runways could help too, offering significant reductions in cost and carbon emissions. Lighter materials and more efficient spacing of seats could dramatically reduce fuel consumption for equivalent loads.

Finally, airlines can partner to play a key role in developing more reliable carbon offset markets. As discussed in a recent Nature paper, carbon offsets are not all equal because they store carbon for longer or shorter times. Airlines can hold competitors to account on weak carbon offset standards and lobby for industry-wide carbon audit processes that are conducted through independent review.

The impacts of COVID-19 on aviation are only just beginning to be felt. Governments should use bailouts to encourage innovation and get something for all of us, and the climate, in return.

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For airlines, the reckoning is no longer far away on the horizon. It's now a jumbo jet meters from the runway, landing gear down. Without a sizeable external cash injection, many international airlines will follow Virgin Australia into insolvency within months, if not weeks. Should governments bail airlines out?

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Like the Black Death of the Middle Ages, COVID-19 is driving major changes in the global structures of wealth and power

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In June 1348, people in England began reporting mysterious symptoms. They started off as mild and vague: headaches, aches, and nausea. This was followed by painful black lumps, or buboes, growing in the armpits and groin, which gave the disease its name: bubonic plague. The last stage was a high fever, and then death.

Originating in Central Asia, soldiers and caravans had brought bubonic plague - Yersina pestis, a bacterium carried on fleas that lived on rats - to ports on the Black Sea. The highly commercialised world of the Mediterranean ensured the plague's swift transfer on merchant ships to Italy, and then across Europe. The Black Death killed between a third and a half of the population of Europe and the Near East.

This huge number of deaths was accompanied by general economic devastation. With a third of the workforce dead, the crops could not be harvested and communities fell apart. One in ten villages in England (and in Tuscany and other regions) were lost and never re-founded. Houses fell into the ground and were covered by grass and earth, leaving only the church behind. If you ever see a church or chapel all alone in a field, you are probably looking at the last remains of one of Europe's lost villages.

The traumatic experience of the Black Death, which killed perhaps 80% of those who caught it, drove many people to write in an attempt to make sense of what they had lived through. In Aberdeen, John of Fordun, a Scottish chronicler, recorded that:

This sickness befell people everywhere, but especially the middling and lower classes, rarely the great. It generated such horror that children did not dare to visit their dying parents, nor parents their children, but fled for fear of contagion as if from leprosy or a serpent.

These lines could almost have been written today.

This article is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

Although the death rate from COVID-19 is far lower than that of the Black Death, the economic fallout has been severe due to the globalised, highly-integrated nature of modern economies. Add to this our highly mobile populations today and coronavirus, unlike the plague, has spread across the globe in a matter of months, not years.

While the Black Death resulted in short term economic damage, the longer-term consequences were less obvious. Before the plague erupted, several centuries of population growth had produced a labour surplus, which was abruptly replaced with a labour shortage when many serfs and free peasants died. Historians have argued that this labour shortage allowed those peasants that survived the pandemic to demand better pay or to seek employment elsewhere. Despite government resistance, serfdom and the feudal system itself were ultimately eroded.

But another less often remarked consequence of the Black Death was the rise of wealthy entrepreneurs and business-government links. Although the Black Death caused short-term losses for Europe's largest companies, in the long term, they concentrated their assets and gained a greater share of the market and influence with governments. This has strong parallels with the current situation in many countries across the world. While small companies rely upon government support to prevent them collapsing, many others - mainly the much larger ones involved in home delivery - are profiting handsomely from the new trading conditions.

The mid-14th century economy is too removed from the size, speed, and interconnectedness of the modern market to give exact comparisons. But we can certainly see parallels with the way that the Black Death strengthened the power of the state and accelerated the domination of key markets by a handful of mega-corporations.

Black Death business

The sudden loss of at least a third of Europe's population didn't lead to an even redistribution of wealth for everyone else. Instead, people responded to the devastation by keeping money within the family. Wills became highly specific and wealthy businessmen, in particular, went to great lengths to ensure that their patrimony was no longer divided up after death, replacing the previous tendency to leave a third of all their resources to charity. Their descendants benefited from a continued concentration of capital into a smaller and smaller number of hands.

At the same time, the decline of feudalism and the rise of a wage-based economy following peasant demands for better labour conditions benefited urban elites. Being paid in cash, rather than in kind (in the granting of privileges such as the right to collect firewood), meant that peasants had more money to spend in towns.

This concentration of wealth greatly accelerated a pre-existing trend: the emergence of merchant entrepreneurs who combined trade in goods with their production on a scale only available to those with significant sums of capital. For example, silk, once imported from Asia and Byzantium, was now being produced in Europe. Wealthy Italian merchants began to open silk and cloth workshops.

These entrepreneurs were uniquely positioned to respond to the sudden labour shortage caused by the Black Death. Unlike independent weavers, who lacked the capital, and unlike aristocrats, whose wealth was locked up in land, urban entrepreneurs were able to use their liquid capital to invest in new technologies, compensating for the loss of workers with machines.

In southern Germany, which became one of Europe's most commercialised areas in the late 14th and 15th centuries, companies such as the Welser (which later ran Venezuela as a private colony) combined growing flax with owning the looms on which workers span that flax into linen cloth, which the Welser then sold. The trend of the post-Black Death 14th and 15th centuries was a concentration of resources - capital, skills, and infrastructure - into the hands of a small number of corporations.

The age of Amazon

Rolling forward to the present, there are some clear similarities. Certain large organisations have stepped up to the opportunities provided by COVID-19. In many countries across the world, entire ecologies of small restaurants, pubs and shops have suddenly been closed down. The market for food, general retail and entertainment has gone online, and cash has pretty much disappeared.

The percentage of calories that restaurants provided has had to be rerouted through supermarkets, and much of this supply has now been taken up by supermarket chains. They have plenty of large properties and lots of staff, with the HR capacity to recruit more rapidly, and there are many underemployed people who now want jobs. They also have warehouses, trucks and complex logistics capacity.

The other big winner has been the giants of online retail - such as Amazon, who run a "Prime Pantry" service in the US, India and many European countries. High street shops have been suffering from price and convenience competition from the internet for years, and bankruptcies are regular news. Now, much "non-essential" retail space is closed, and our desires have been re-rerouted through Amazon, eBay, Argos, Screwfix and others. There has been a clear spike in online shopping, and retail analysts are wondering whether this is a decisive move into the virtual world, and the further dominance of big corporations.

Keeping us distracted as we wait at home for our parcels is the streaming entertainment industry - a market sector which is dominated by big corporations including Netflix, Amazon Prime (again), Disney and and others. Other online giants such as Google (which owns YouTube), Facebook (which owns Instagram) and Twitter provide the other platforms that dominate online traffic.

The final link in the chain is the delivery companies themselves: UPS, FedEx, Amazon Logistics (again), as well as food delivery from Just Eat and Deliveroo. Through their business models are different, their platforms now dominate the movements of products of all kinds, whether your new Toshiba branded Amazon Fire TV, or your stuffed crust from Pizza Hut (a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, which also owns KFC, Taco Bell and others).

The other swing to corporate dominance has been the move away from state-backed cash towards contactless payment services. It's obviously a corollary of online marketplaces, but also means that the money moves though big corporations that take their slice for moving it. Visa and Mastercard are the largest players, but Apple Pay, PayPal, and Amazon Pay (again) have all seen increases in their transaction volume as cash sits unused in people's purses. And if cash is still imagined to be a vector for transmission, then retailers won't take it and customers won't use it.

Small business has taken a really decisive hit across a wide range of sectors as COVID-19, like the Black Death, results in big companies gaining market share. Even those working at home to write pieces like this are working on Skype (owned by Microsoft), Zoom and BlueJeans, as well using email clients and laptops made by a small number of global organisations. Billionaires are getting richer while ordinary people lose their jobs. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's CEO, has increased his wealth by US$25 billion since the start of the year.

But this is not the whole story. The other big trend in the response to the virus has been the strengthening of the power of the state.

Governing pandemics

At a state level, the Black Death caused the acceleration of trends towards centralisation, the growth of taxation, and government dependence upon large companies.

In England, the declining value of land and consequent falls in revenue prompted the crown - the country's biggest landowner - to attempt to cap wages at pre-plague levels with the 1351 Statute of Labourers, and to impose additional taxes upon the populace. Previously, the government was expected to fund itself, only imposing taxes for extraordinary expenses such as wars. But the post-plague taxes set a major precedent for government intervention in the economy.

These governmental efforts were a significant increase in the crown's involvement in people's daily lives. In subsequent plague outbreaks, which occurred every 20 years or so, movement began to be restricted through curfews, travel bans, and quarantines. This was part of a general concentration of state power and the replacement of the previous regional distribution of authority with a centralised bureaucracy. Many of the men running the post-plague administration, such as the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, were drawn from English merchant families, some of which gained significant political power.

The most outstanding example of this was the de la Pole family, who in two generations went from being Hull wool merchants to earls of Suffolk. With the temporary collapse of international trade and finance after the Black Death, Richard de la Pole became the crown's greatest lender and an intimate of Richard II. When Italian mega-companies re-emerged in the late 14th and 15th centuries, they also benefited from the crown's ever-growing reliance upon merchant companies. The Medici family, who eventually came to rule Florence, are the most striking example.

Merchants also gained political influence by purchasing land, the price of which had fallen after the Black Death. Land ownership allowed merchants to enter the land-based gentry or even the aristocracy, marrying their children to the sons and daughters of cash-strapped lords. With their new status, and with the help of influential in-laws, the urban elites gained political representation within parliament.

By the end of the 14th century, the government's extension of state control and its continued ties to merchant companies drove many nobles to turn against Richard II. They transferred their allegiance to his cousin, who became Henry IV, in the (vain) hope that he would not follow Richard's policies.

This, and the subsequent Wars of the Roses, generally depicted as a clash between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, were actually partly driven by the nobility's hostility towards the centralisation of government power. Henry Tudor's defeat of Richard III in 1489 ended not only the war but also quashed any further attempts by the English baronage to regain regional authority, paving the way for the continued rise of corporations and central government.

The state we are in

The power of the state is something that we largely assume in the 21st century. Across the world, the idea of the sovereign nation has been central to the imperial politics and economy of the last few centuries.

But from the 1970s onwards, it became common among intellectuals to suggest that the state was less important, its monopoly of control within a given territory contested by multinational corporations. In 2016, of the largest 100 economic entities, 31 were countries and 69 were companies. Walmart was larger than the economy of Spain, Toyota larger than India. The capacity of these large companies to influence politicians and regulators has been clear enough: consider the effects of oil companies on climate change denial.

And since Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of the UK from 1979 to 1990, pronounced that she intended to "roll back the state", more and more parts of previously state-owned assets now operate as companies, or as players in state engineered quasi-markets. Roughly 25% of the UK's National Health Service, for example, is delivered through contracts with the private sector.

Across the globe, transport, utilities, telecommunications, dentists, opticians, the post office and many other services used to be state monopolies and are now run by profit-making companies. Nationalised, or state owned, industries are often described as slow, and in need of market discipline in order to become more modern and efficient.

But thanks to coronavirus, the state has come rolling back in again like a tsunami. Spending on a level which was mocked as "magic money tree" economics only a few months ago has been aimed at national health systems, addressed the problem of homelessness, provided universal basic income for millions of people, and offered loan guarantees or direct payments to a host of businesses.

Rajat Gupta/EPA-EFE

This is Keynesian economics on a grand scale, in which national bonds are used to borrow money backed by future income from taxpayers. Ideas about balancing the budget appear to, for now, be history, with entire industries now being reliant on treasury bailouts. Politicians the world over have suddenly become interventionist, with wartime metaphors being used to justify gigantic spending.

Less often remarked is the astonishing restriction on personal freedoms. The autonomy of the individual is central to neoliberal ideas. "Freedom loving peoples" are contrasted with those who live their lives under the yoke of tyranny, of states that exercise Big Brother surveillance powers over their citizens behaviour.

Yet in the last few months, states around the world have effectively restricted movement for the vast majority of people and are using the police and armed forces to prevent assembly in public and private spaces. Theatres, pubs and restaurants are closed by fiat, parks have been locked, and sitting on benches can get you a fine. Running too close to someone will get you shouted at by someone in a high vis vest. A medieval king would have been impressed with this level of authoritarianism.

The pandemic seems to have allowed the fiscal and administrative powers of big government to bulldozer arguments about prudence and liberty. The state's power is now being exercised in ways that haven't been seen since the second world war, and there has been widespread public support.

Popular resistance

To return to the Black Death, the growth in wealth and influence of merchants and big business seriously aggravated existing anti-mercantile sentiment. Medieval thought - both intellectual and popular - held that trade was morally suspect and that merchants, especially wealthy ones, were prone to avarice. The Black Death was widely interpreted as a punishment from God for Europe's sinfulness, and many post-plague writers blamed the church, governments, and wealthy companies for Christendom's moral decline.

William Langland's famous protest poem Piers Plowman was strongly anti-mercantilist. Other works, such as the mid-15th century poem the Libelle of Englysche Polycye, tolerated trade but wanted it in the hands of English merchants and out of the control of Italians, whom the author argued impoverished the country.

As the 14th and 15th centuries progressed and corporations gained a greater share of the market, popular and intellectual hostility grew. In the longer term, this was to have incendiary results. By the 16th century, the concentration of trade and finance into the hands of corporations had evolved into a near-monopoly upon royal and papal banking by a small number of companies who also held monopolies or near-monopolies over Europe's major commodities - such as silver, copper, and mercury - and imports from Asia and the Americas, especially spices.

Martin Luther was incensed by this concentration and especially the Catholic Church's use of monopolistic firms to collect indulgences. In 1524, Luther published a tract arguing that trade should be for the common (German) good and that merchants should not charge high prices. Along with other Protestant writers, such as Philip Melancthon and Ulrich von Hutten, Luther drew upon existing anti-mercantile sentiment to criticise the influence of business over government, adding financial injustice to their call for religious reform.

The sociologist Max Weber famously associated Protestantism with the emergence of capitalism and modern economic thought. But early Protestant writers opposed multinational corporations and the commercialisation of everyday life, drawing upon anti-mercantile sentiment that had its roots in the Black Death. This popular and religious opposition eventually led to the break from Rome and the transformation of Europe.

Is small always beautiful?

By the 21st century we have become used to the idea that capitalist firms produce concentrations of wealth. Whether Victorian industrialists, US robber barons or dot com billionaires, the inequalities generated by business and its corrupting influence over governments have shaped discussion of commerce since the industrial revolution. For critics, big business has often been characterised as heartless, a behemoth that crushes ordinary people in the wheels of its machines, or vampirically extracts the profits of labour from the labouring classes.

As we have seen, the arguments between small business localists and those who favour corporations and the power of the state date back many centuries. Romantic poets and radicals bemoaned the way that the " dark satanic mills " were destroying the countryside and producing people who were no more than appendages to machines. The idea that the honest craftsman was being replaced by the alienated employee, a wage slave, is common to both nostalgic and progressive critics of early capitalism.

By the 1960s, the idea that there was some fundamental difference between small and large forms of business added environmentalism to these longstanding arguments. "The man" in his skyscraper was opposed to the more authentic artisan.

This faith in local business combined with a suspicion of corporations and the state have flowed into the green, Occupy and Extinction Rebellion movements. Eating local food, using local money, and trying to tilt the purchasing power of "anchor institutions" like hospitals and universities towards small social enterprises has become the common sense of many contemporary economic activists.

Kim Ludbrook/EPA-EFE

But the COVID-19 crisis questions this small is good, big is bad dichotomy in some very fundamental ways. Large scale organising has appeared to be necessary to deal with the huge range of issues that the virus has thrown up, and the states that appear to have been most successful are those which have adopted the most interventionist forms of surveillance and control. Even the most ardent post-capitalist would have to admit that small social enterprises could not fit out a gigantic hospital in a few weeks.

And though there are plenty of examples of local businesses engaging in food delivery, and a commendable amount of mutual aid taking place, the population of the global north is largely being fed by large supermarket chains with complex logistics operations.

After coronavirus

The long-term result of the Black Death was the strengthening of the power of big business and the state. The same processes are happening much more rapidly during the coronavirus lockdown.

But we should be cautious of easy historical lessons. History never really repeats itself. The circumstances of each time are unique, and it simply isn't wise to treat the "lesson" of history as if it were a series of experiments that prove certain general laws. And COVID-19 will not kill a third of any population, so though its effects are profound, they will not result in the same shortage of working people. If anything, it has actually strengthened the power of employers.

The most profound difference is that the virus comes in the middle of another crisis, that of climate change. There is a real danger that the policy of bouncing back to a growth economy will simply overwhelm the necessity of reducing carbon emissions. This is the nightmare scenario, one in which COVID-19 is just a prequel to something much worse.

But the huge mobilisations of people and money which governments and corporations have deployed also shows that big organisations can reshape themselves and the world extraordinarily rapidly if they wish. This gives real grounds for optimism concerning our collective capacity to re-engineer energy production, transport, food systems and much else - the green new deal which many policy makers have been sponsoring.

The Black Death and COVID-19 seem to have both caused concentration and centralisation of business and state power. That is interesting to note. But the biggest question is whether these potent forces can be aimed at the crisis to come.

For you: more from our Insights series: To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation's evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.

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How pandemics past and present fuel the rise of mega-corporations

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In June 1348, people in England began reporting mysterious symptoms. They started off as mild and vague: headaches, aches, and nausea. This was followed by painful black lumps, or buboes, growing in the armpits and groin, which gave the disease its name: bubonic plague. The last stage was a high fever, and then death.

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Where will we be in six months, a year, ten years from now? I lie awake at night wondering what the future holds for my loved ones. My vulnerable friends and relatives. I wonder what will happen to my job, even though I'm luckier than many: I get good sick pay and can work remotely. I am writing this from the UK, where I still have self-employed friends who are staring down the barrel of months without pay, friends who have already lost jobs. The contract that pays 80% of my salary runs out in December. Coronavirus is hitting the economy bad. Will anyone be hiring when I need work?

There are a number of possible futures, all dependent on how governments and society respond to coronavirus and its economic aftermath. Hopefully we will use this crisis to rebuild, produce something better and more humane. But we may slide into something worse.

I think we can understand our situation - and what might lie in our future - by looking at the political economy of other crises. My research focuses on the fundamentals of the modern economy: global supply chains, wages, and productivity. I look at the way that economic dynamics contribute to challenges like climate change and low levels of mental and physical health among workers. I have argued that we need a very different kind of economics if we are to build socially just and ecologically sound futures. In the face of COVID-19, this has never been more obvious.

The responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are simply the amplification of the dynamic that drives other social and ecological crises: the prioritisation of one type of value over others. This dynamic has played a large part in driving global responses to COVID-19. So as responses to the virus evolve, how might our economic futures develop?

From an economic perspective, there are four possible futures: a descent into barbarism, a robust state capitalism, a radical state socialism, and a transformation into a big society built on mutual aid. Versions of all of these futures are perfectly possible, if not equally desirable.

Jose Antonio Gallego Vázquez/Unsplash, FAL

Small changes don't cut it

Coronavirus, like climate change, is partly a problem of our economic structure. Although both appear to be "environmental" or "natural" problems, they are socially driven.

Yes, climate change is caused by certain gases absorbing heat. But that's a very shallow explanation. To really understand climate change, we need to understand the social reasons that keep us emitting greenhouse gases. Likewise with COVID-19. Yes, the direct cause is the virus. But managing its effects requires us to understand human behaviour and its wider economic context.

Tackling both COVID-19 and climate change is much easier if you reduce nonessential economic activity. For climate change this is because if you produce less stuff, you use less energy, and emit fewer greenhouse gases. The epidemiology of COVID-19 is rapidly evolving. But the core logic is similarly simple. People mix together and spread infections. This happens in households, and in workplaces, and on the journeys people make. Reducing this mixing is likely to reduce person-to-person transmission and lead to fewer cases overall.

This article is part of Conversation Insights
The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

Reducing contact between people probably also helps with other control strategies. One common control strategy for infectious disease outbreaks is contact tracing and isolation, where an infected person's contacts are identified, then isolated to prevent further disease spread. This is most effective when you trace a high percentage of contacts. The fewer contacts a person has, the fewer you have to trace to get to that higher percentage.

We can see from Wuhan that social distancing and lockdown measures like this are effective. Political economy is useful in helping us understand why they weren't introduced earlier in European countries (most notably the UK and the US).

A fragile economy

Lockdown is placing pressure on the global economy. We face a serious recession. This pressure has led some world leaders to call for an easing of lockdown measures.

Even as 19 countries sat in a state of lockdown, the US president, Donald Trump, and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called for roll backs in mitigation measures. Trump called for the American economy to get back to normal in three weeks (he has now accepted that social distancing will need to be maintained for much longer). Bolsonaro said: "Our lives have to go on. Jobs must be kept ... We must, yes, get back to normal."

In the UK meanwhile, four days before calling for a three-week lockdown, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was only marginally less optimistic, saying that the UK could turn the tide within 12 weeks. Yet even if Johnson is correct, it remains the case that we are living with an economic system that will threaten collapse at the next sign of pandemic.

The economics of collapse are fairly straight forward. Businesses exist to make a profit. If they can't produce, they can't sell things. This means they won't make profits, which means they are less able to employ you. Businesses can and do (over short time periods) hold on to workers that they don't need immediately: they want to be able to meet demand when the economy picks back up again. But, if things start to look really bad, then they won't. So, more people lose their jobs or fear losing their jobs. So they buy less. And the whole cycle starts again, and we spiral into an economic depression.

Yui Mok/PA Wire/PA Images

In a normal crisis the prescription for solving this is simple. The government spends, and it spends until people start consuming and working again. (This prescription is what the economist John Maynard Keynes is famous for).

But normal interventions won't work here because we don't want the economy to recover (at least, not immediately). The whole point of the lockdown is to stop people going to work, where they spread the disease. One recent study suggested that lifting lockdown measures in Wuhan (including workplace closures) too soon could see China experience a second peak of cases later in 2020.

As the economist James Meadway wrote, the correct COVID-19 response isn't a wartime economy - with massive upscaling of production. Rather, we need an "anti-wartime" economy and a massive scaling back of production. And if we want to be more resilient to pandemics in the future (and to avoid the worst of climate change) we need a system capable of scaling back production in a way that doesn't mean loss of livelihood.

So what we need is a different economic mindset. We tend to think of the economy as the way we buy and sell things, mainly consumer goods. But this is not what an economy is or needs to be. At its core, the economy is the way we take our resources and turn them into the things we need to live. Looked at this way, we can start to see more opportunities for living differently that allow us to produce less stuff without increasing misery.

I and other ecological economists have long been concerned with the question of how you produce less in a socially just way, because the challenge of producing less is also central to tackling climate change. All else equal, the more we produce the more greenhouse gases we emit. So how do you reduce the amount of stuff you make while keeping people in work?

Proposals include reducing the length of the working week, or, as some of my recent work has looked at, you could allow people to work more slowly and with less pressure. Neither of these is directly applicable to COVID-19, where the aim is reducing contact rather than output, but the core of the proposals is the same. You have to reduce people's dependence on a wage to be able to live.

EPA-EFE/Mahmoud Khaled

What is the economy for?

The key to understanding responses to COVID-19 is the question of what the economy is for. Currently, the primary aim of the global economy is to facilitate exchanges of money. This is what economists call "exchange value".

The dominant idea of the current system we live in is that exchange value is the same thing as use value. Basically, people will spend money on the things that they want or need, and this act of spending money tells us something about how much they value its "use". This is why markets are seen as the best way to run society. They allow you to adapt, and are flexible enough to match up productive capacity with use value.

What COVID-19 is throwing into sharp relief is just how false our beliefs about markets are. Around the world, governments fear that critical systems will be disrupted or overloaded: supply chains, social care, but principally healthcare. There are lots of contributing factors to this. But let's take two.

First, it is quite hard to make money from many of the most essential societal services. This is in part because a major driver of profits is labour productivity growth: doing more with fewer people. People are a big cost factor in many businesses, especially those that rely on personal interactions, like healthcare. Consequently, productivity growth in the healthcare sector tends to be lower than the rest of the economy, so its costs go up faster than average.

Second, jobs in many critical services aren't those that tend to be highest valued in society. Many of the best paid jobs only exist to facilitate exchanges; to make money. They serve no wider purpose to society: they are what the anthropologist David Graeber calls " bullshit jobs". Yet because they make lots of money we have lots of consultants, a huge advertising industry and a massive financial sector. Meanwhile, we have a crisis in health and social care, where people are often forced out of useful jobs they enjoy, because these jobs don't pay them enough to live.

Jesus Sanz/Shutterstock.com

Pointless jobs

The fact that so many people work pointless jobs is partly why we are so ill prepared to respond to COVID-19. The pandemic is highlighting that many jobs are not essential, yet we lack sufficient key workers to respond when things go bad.

People are compelled to work pointless jobs because in a society where exchange value is the guiding principle of the economy, the basic goods of life are mainly available through markets. This means you have to buy them, and to buy them you need an income, which comes from a job.

The other side of this coin is that the most radical (and effective) responses that we are seeing to the COVID-19 outbreak challenge the dominance of markets and exchange value. Around the world governments are taking actions that three months ago looked impossible. In Spain, private hospitals have been nationalised. In the UK, the prospect of nationalising various modes of transport has become very real. And France has stated its readiness to nationalise large businesses.

Likewise, we are seeing the breakdown of labour markets. Countries like Denmark and the UK are providing people with an income in order to stop them from going to work. This is an essential part of a successful lockdown. These measures are far from perfect. Nonetheless, it is a shift from the principle that people have to work in order to earn their income, and a move towards the idea that people deserve to be able to live even if they cannot work.

This reverses the dominant trends of the last 40 years. Over this time, markets and exchange values have been seen as the best way of running an economy. Consequently, public systems have come under increasing pressures to marketise, to be run as though they were businesses who have to make money. Likewise, workers have become more and more exposed to the market - zero-hours contracts and the gig economy have removed the layer of protection from market fluctuations that long term, stable, employment used to offer.

Stephanie Lecocq/EPA-EFE

COVID-19 appears to be reversing this trend, taking healthcare and labour goods out of the market and putting it into the hands of the state. States produce for many reasons. Some good and some bad. But unlike markets, they do not have to produce for exchange value alone.

These changes give me hope. They give us the chance to save many lives. They even hint at the possibility of longer term change that makes us happier and helps us tackle climate change. But why did it take us so long to get here? Why were many countries so ill-prepared to slowdown production? The answer lies in a recent World Health Organisation report: they did not have the right " mindset ".

Our economic imaginations

There has been a broad economic consensus for 40 years. This has limited the ability of politicians and their advisers to see cracks in the system, or imagine alternatives. This mindset is driven by two linked beliefs:

The market is what delivers a good quality of life, so it must be protected

The market will always return to normal after short periods of crisis

These views are common to many Western countries. But they are strongest in the UK and the US, both of which have appeared to be badly prepared to respond to COVID-19.

In the UK, attendees at a private engagement reportedly summarised the Prime Minister's most senior aide's approach to COVID-19 as "herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad". The government has denied this, but if real, it's not surprising. At a government event early in the pandemic, a senior civil servant said to me: "Is it worth the economic disruption? If you look at the treasury valuation of a life, probably not."

This kind of view is endemic in a particular elite class. It is well represented by a Texas official who argued that many elderly people would gladly die rather than see the US sink into economic depression. This view endangers many vulnerable people (and not all vulnerable people are elderly), and, as I have tried to lay out here, it is a false choice.

One of the things the COVID-19 crisis could be doing, is expanding that economic imagination. As governments and citizens take steps that three months ago seemed impossible, our ideas about how the world works could change rapidly. Let us look at where this re-imagining could take us.

Four futures

To help us visit the future, I'm going to use a technique from the field of futures studies. You take two factors you think will be important in driving the future, and you imagine what will happen under different combinations of those factors.

The factors I want to take are value and centralisation. Value refers to whatever is the guiding principle of our economy. Do we use our resources to maximise exchanges and money, or do we use them to maximise life? Centralisation refers to the ways that things are organised, either by of lots of small units or by one big commanding force. We can organise these factors into a grid, which can then be populated with scenarios. So we can think about what might happen if we try to respond to the coronavirus with the four extreme combinations:

1) State capitalism: centralised response, prioritising exchange value
2) Barbarism: decentralised response prioritising exchange value
3) State socialism: centralised response, prioritising the protection of life
4) Mutual aid: decentralised response prioritising the protection of life.

© Simon Mair, Author provided

State capitalism

State capitalism is the dominant response we are seeing across the world right now. Typical examples are the UK, Spain and Denmark.

The state capitalist society continues to pursue exchange value as the guiding light of the economy. But it recognises that markets in crisis require support from the state. Given that many workers cannot work because they are ill, and fear for their lives, the state steps in with extended welfare. It also enacts massive Keynesian stimulus by extending credit and making direct payments to businesses.

The expectation here is that this is will be for a short period. The primary function of the steps being taken is to allow as many businesses as possible to keep on trading. In the UK, for example, food is still distributed by markets (though the government has relaxed competition laws). Where workers are supported directly, this is done in ways that seek to minimise disruption normal labour market functioning. So, for example, as in the UK, payments to workers have to be applied for and distributed by employers. And the size of payments is made on the basis of the exchange value a worker usually creates in the market, rather than the usefulness of their work.

Could this be a successful scenario? Possibly, but only if COVID-19 proves controllable over a short period. As full lockdown is avoided to maintain market functioning, transmission of infection is still likely to continue. In the UK, for instance, non-essential construction is still continuing, leaving workers mixing on building sites. But limited state intervention will become increasingly hard to maintain if death tolls rise. Increased illness and death will provoke unrest and deepen economic impacts, forcing the state to take more and more radical actions to try maintain market functioning.

Barbarism

This is the bleakest scenario. Barbarism is the future if we continue to rely on exchange value as our guiding principle and yet refuse to extend support to those who get locked out of markets by illness or unemployment. It describes a situation that we have not yet seen.

Businesses fail and workers starve because there are no mechanisms in place to protect them from the harsh realities of the market. Hospitals are not supported by extraordinary measures, and so become overwhelmed. People die. Barbarism is ultimately an unstable state that ends in ruin or a transition to one of the other grid sections after a period of political and social devastation.

Could this happen? The concern is that either it could happen by mistake during the pandemic, or by intention after the pandemic peaks. The mistake is if a government fails to step in in a big enough way during the worst of the pandemic. Support might be offered to businesses and households, but if this isn't enough to prevent market collapse in the face of widespread illness, chaos would ensue. Hospitals might be sent extra funds and people, but if it's not enough, ill people will be turned away in large numbers.

Potentially just as consequential is the possibility of massive austerity after the pandemic has peaked and governments seek to return to "normal". This has been threatened in Germany. This would be disastrous. Not least because defunding of critical services during austerity has impacted the ability of countries to respond to this pandemic.

The subsequent failure of the economy and society would trigger political and stable unrest, leading to a failed state and the collapse of both state and community welfare systems.

State socialism

State socialism describes the first of the futures we could see with a cultural shift that places a different kind of value at the heart of the economy. This is the future we arrive at with an extension of the measures we are currently seeing in the UK, Spain and Denmark.

The key here is that measures like nationalisation of hospitals and payments to workers are seen not as tools to protect markets, but a way to protect life itself. In such a scenario, the state steps in to protect the parts of the economy that are essential to life: the production of food, energy and shelter for instance, so that the basic provisions of life are no longer at the whim of the market. The state nationalises hospitals, and makes housing freely available. Finally, it provides all citizens with a means of accessing various goods - both basics and any consumer goods we are able to produce with a reduced workforce.

Citizens no longer rely on employers as intermediaries between them and the basic materials of life. Payments are made to everyone directly and are not related to the exchange value they create. Instead, payments are the same to all (on the basis that we deserve to be able to live, simply because we are alive), or they are based on the usefulness of the work. Supermarket workers, delivery drivers, warehouse stackers, nurses, teachers, and doctors are the new CEOs.

It's possible that state socialism emerges as a consequence of attempts at state capitalism and the effects of a prolonged pandemic. If deep recessions happen and there is disruption in supply chains such that demand cannot be rescued by the kind of standard Keynesian policies we are seeing now (printing money, making loans easier to get and so on), the state may take over production.

There are risks to this approach - we must be careful to avoid authoritarianism. But done well, this may be our best hope against an extreme COVID-19 outbreak. A strong state able to marshal the resources to protect the core functions of economy and society.

Mutual aid

Mutual aid is the second future in which we adopt the protection of life as the guiding principle of our economy. But, in this scenario, the state does not take a defining role. Rather, individuals and small groups begin to organise support and care within their communities.

The risks with this future is that small groups are unable to rapidly mobilise the kind of resources needed to effectively increase healthcare capacity, for instance. But mutual aid could enable more effective transmission prevention, by building community support networks that protect the vulnerable and police isolation rules. The most ambitious form of this future sees new democratic structures arise. Groupings of communities that are able to mobilise substantial resources with relative speed. People coming together to plan regional responses to stop disease spread and (if they have the skills) to treat patients.

Sergio Pontorieri/EPA-EFE

This kind of scenario could emerge from any of the others. It is a possible way out of barbarism, or state capitalism, and could support state socialism. We know that community responses were central to tackling the West African Ebola outbreak. And we already see the roots of this future today in the groups organising care packages and community support. We can see this as a failure of state responses. Or we can see it as a pragmatic, compassionate societal response to an unfolding crisis.

Hope and fear

These visions are extreme scenarios, caricatures, and likely to bleed into one another. My fear is the descent from state capitalism into barbarism. My hope is a blend of state socialism and mutual aid: a strong, democratic state that mobilises resources to build a stronger health system, prioritises protecting the vulnerable from the whims of the market and responds to and enables citizens to form mutual aid groups rather than working meaningless jobs.

What hopefully is clear is that all these scenarios leave some grounds for fear, but also some for hope. COVID-19 is highlighting serious deficiencies in our existing system. An effective response to this is likely to require radical social change. I have argued it requires a drastic move away from markets and the use of profits as the primary way of organising an economy. The upside of this is the possibility that we build a more humane system that leaves us more resilient in the face of future pandemics and other impending crises like climate change.

Social change can come from many places and with many influences. A key task for us all is demanding that emerging social forms come from an ethic that values care, life, and democracy. The central political task in this time of crisis is living and (virtually) organising around those values.

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What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures

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Where will we be in six months, a year, ten years from now? I lie awake at night wondering what the future holds for my loved ones. My vulnerable friends and relatives. I wonder what will happen to my job, even though I'm luckier than many: I get good sick pay and can work remotely.

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INDUSTRY RESPONSE TO LATEST GOVERNMENT MEASURES

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INDUSTRY RESPONSE TO LATEST GOVERNMENT MEASURES

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Autumn 2020

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The European commission has put down a marker for the world with its green recovery package. It sets a high standard for other nations, using the rebuilding of coronavirus-ravaged economies to tackle the even greater threat of the climate emergency, in principle at least.

With the world fast approaching the point when climate chaos becomes inevitable, how the trillions of recovery dollars - or euros - are spent is a use-it-or-lose-it moment, so what the EU does really matters. Climate change is a global crisis, meaning all nations must act and some must lead the way.

Under Donald Trump, the US is slashing green protections while the biggest polluter, China, is sending mixed messages by backing coal power stations as part of its recovery. The UK, host of the next critical UN summit, has been all but silent.

The EU's plan seeks to pour money into emissions-busting sectors: €91bn (£81bn) a year for home energy efficiency and green heating, €25bn of renewable energy, and €20bn for clean cars over two years, plus 2m charging points in five years. Up to €60bn will go to zero-emissions trains and the production of 1m tonnes of clean hydrogen is planned.

A charging point for electric cars in Gdansk, Poland. Photograph: NurPhoto/Getty

At least a million green jobs will be created, with workers in polluting industries helped into new roles, a critical part of the plan. Increasing the Just Transition Fund more than fivefold to €40bn minimises the risk of protests against green measures, especially in states with the heaviest coal use such as Poland, Germany and Romania, which will be among the biggest recipients. This is politically necessary, despite investment in the green economy already being a no-brainer.

The EU plan may even have a direct impact on the rest of the world, with a border tax on carbon-intensive industrial imports from other nations potentially raising up to €14bn.

But despite the European commission saying "public investments in the recovery should respect the green oath to 'do no harm'", critics worry there are no hard guarantees against the money seeping into dirty projects. The Covid-19 crisis has seen polluters lobbying hard for bailouts.

The Just Transition Fund will be routed through the European Investment Bank, but campaigners say its climate criteria allow the backing of gas projects that would lock in emissions for years. Another key fund, the €150bn React EU programme, allows member states to decide how to spend the money - most of the almost €2tn in coronavirus rescue funds spent by EU nations so far has had no green guarantees.

Worse, say critics, climate conditions on large parts of the main EU budget have been lifted for three years because of the pandemic. The proportion of the budget reserved for climate projects remains stuck at 25%, despite demands by the European parliament and many others to raise it.

The commission rejects these criticisms, saying the "objective of the green economy is present throughout the whole management of the funds". Whether this oversight proves effective will be the critical test.

Nonetheless, green-leaning business and investor groups have welcomed the recovery package, calling it bold and substantive. To turn it into reality, there will now be weeks of wrangling between EU countries to finalise the deal.

We must hope that they, and the rest of the world's nations, in turn, bear in mind the words of the EU commission president, Ursula von der Leyen: "Sooner or later we will find a vaccine for the coronavirus. But there is no vaccine for climate change. Therefore [we] need a recovery plan designed for the future."

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EU green recovery package sets a marker for the world

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The European commission has put down a marker for the world with its green recovery package. It sets a high standard for other nations, using the rebuilding of coronavirus-ravaged economies to tackle the even greater threat of the climate emergency, in principle at least.

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POLLUTERS LOBBYING FOR BAILOUT FROM COVID CRISIS

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POLLUTERS LOBBYING FOR BAILOUT FROM COVID CRISIS

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Polluting industries around the world are using the coronavirus pandemic to gain billions of dollars in bailouts and to weaken and delay environmental protections.

The moves by the fossil fuel, motor, aviation, farming, plastic and timber sectors are described as dangerous and irresponsible by senior figures. Environmental campaigners describe some participants in these industries as " coronavirus profiteers ".

Economic and energy leaders say the unprecedented sums of money being committed to the global recovery are a historic opportunity to tackle the climate crisis and create a safer, more resilient, world. However, such action has been lacking to date, they warn.

Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said: "When I look at different parts of the world I have not seen yet a major emphasis on clean-energy technologies." He warned of mistakes similar to those made after the 2008 financial crisis when stimulus packages led to the biggest leap in carbon emissions in 50 years, four times greater than the reduction initially seen.

"If we put the money in the right place, we can manage the [climate] risk, and have a much more modern, cleaner and safer energy system," Birol told the Guardian. "But if you put the money in the wrong place we will lock ourselves in a dirtier energy system, making it much more difficult to reach our climate targets."

Rachel Kyte, at Tufts University, US, a former UN special representative for energy and former World Bank Group vice president, said: "Covid-19 puts our economies at a fork in the road. Using public money to bail out firms that will take us on the road which doesn't accelerate decarbonisation and doesn't address inequality is not just unaffordable, it's dangerous."

Unlike in the US, where the Trump administration has rolled back environmental protections, the EU has backed a green recovery.

Frans Timmermans, executive vice-president for the Green Deal at the European commission, said: "[Tackling the Covid-19 emergency] cannot and will not throw us off course in our efforts to tackle the climate crisis that still looms large as one of humanity's most daunting challenges."

"Bailouts should all be linked with clear conditions that the money will be used for a green economy and a green society. The very least that should be done is to ascertain that none of our commitments are used to harm our climate goals."

The nature of the global economic recovery is being shaped with meetings this week of G20 finance ministers and central bankers, and by the World Bank and IMF. Much of the initial financial aid from governments was rescue packages to prevent immediate economic collapse, but further huge sums are expected to build recovery.

Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation, who was France's climate change ambassador when the global Paris climate deal was sealed in 2015, said: "We know speed is essential with so many lives and livelihoods at stake, but it would be irresponsible to knowingly lock in more human suffering by enabling more pollution."

Lord Stern, a climate economist at the London School of Economics, UK, said: "The nature and shape of this recovery will determine our future. It is crucial [it] does not lock in our exposure to the great risks of climate change." But he said it was important to distinguish between rescue packages and recovery packages and not, for example, to withhold support for the workers in high-carbon sectors.

Michael Liebrich, founder of Bloomberg New Energy Finance, said the systems of the past were already failing the world before Covid-19. "As governments again load the helicopters with money to dump on the global economy ... no fossil fuel-based businesses should be bailed out without committing to science-based, net-zero targets. No money should go to industries that have been living high on the hog on fossil fuel subsidies and tax loopholes, like the airline industry, unless they accept structural reform."

Ben Backwell, CEO at the Global Wind Energy Council, said some governments had extended commissioning deadlines for new wind farms, including those of India, Germany and Greece. "But so far no government has explicitly included stimulus packages specific to the wind and other renewable sectors. Much diplomatic effort went into brokering the OPEC+ deal to stabilise oil prices but the discussion needs to move on now to ensuring that renewable energy is at the centre of economic recovery plans."

The course of the recovery has yet to be decided, according to Tom Burke, chair of the E3G thinktank. "I think it is too soon to say that the battle for funds to rebuild our economy is being won by the polluting sectors of business, especially on climate change. There are some strong political forces already pushing hard to make it a recovery that is green."

Timmermans said a sustainable society was the only way to create lasting growth and jobs. Birol, who highlighted energy efficiency for buildings and battery and hydrogen technologies as important goals, also said that the current low oil prices were an opportunity to abolish $400bn a year of consumer fossil fuel subsidies, boosting government budgets.

The UN secretary general, António Guterres, was clear about the need to rebuild a different global economy. "Everything we do during and after this crisis must be with a strong focus on building more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies, and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change, and the many other global challenges we face."

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'Coronavirus profiteers' condemned as polluters gain bailout billions

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Polluting industries around the world are using the coronavirus pandemic to gain billions of dollars in bailouts and to weaken and delay environmental protections. The moves by the fossil fuel, motor, aviation, farming, plastic and timber sectors are described as dangerous and irresponsible by senior figures.

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Perhaps not the move some might have expected initially from Amazon - but the e-commerce giant is making another foray into the travel, tourism and hospitality industry.

Amazon Explore launched this week in a bid to capture an apparent demand in people going virtual to experience tours and activities in destinations.

The platform includes a sizeable range of products ranging from virtual walking tours of cities and visiting landmarks to cooking courses and destination retail trips.

Users can select from three options: learning and creating, local shopping and culture and landmarks.

However, Explore is currently in beta mode and although the platform is open to all, virtual experiences are only available by "invitation only" - meaning users must make a request to the host of each experience.

Each session is estimated to take around 30 to 60 minutes and is handled through the usual Amazon checkout process.

Product is supplied by a range of partners including well-known tour and activity brand, Intrepid Urban Adventures.

The company's virtual tour of Prague will cost $85 for a 60-minute session, for example.

Amazon is also looking for individuals to become suppliers of product in their destinations, essentially becoming two-sided marketplace that it is famed for having in countless other retail verticals.

The company has yet to respond to requests for comment.

The quiet unveiling of Explore comes 15 months after Amazon launched a flight search and booking service for users in India, powered by domestic online travel agency, Cleartrip.

The integration works through the Amazon Pay section in the site, where members can select services ranging from utility bills to gift cards.

Carriers such as AirAsia, IndiGo, Air India and GoAir are shown in the search results.

In June this year Amazon acquired autonomous vehicle technology company Zoox for an undisclosed fee (some reports suggested $1 billion).

The company was six years old at the time of the deal and had created zero-emission, purpose-built vehicles for autonomous ride-hailing.

It is also almost five years to the day since Amazon shut a previous travel-related experiment known as Amazon Destinations.

After dabbling in something called Amazon Local a few years before, Destinations was an effort to sell a broader array of travel services besides hotels: "overnight tours," "guest houses," "cruises," and "airport shuttles."

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Amazon launches virtual tours and activities for destinations | PhocusWire

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Perhaps not the move some might have expected initially from Amazon - but the e-commerce giant is making another foray into the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. Amazon Explore launched this week in a bid to capture an apparent demand in people going virtual to experience tours and activities in destinations.

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Blog about the future viability of meetings, incentives, conferences and events tourism - previously regarded as a major and lucrative growth area

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Tourism does love an acronym, and those exposed to the sector will swiftly come across the term MICE, used as shorthand for 'Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions'. That said, many august bodies prefer the term 'Meetings Industry', but that would have scuppered my play on words for the title for this blog...

As with so many aspects of the tourism sector putting a precise figure on the value of MICE activity in the UK is challenging, but we can safely say it is measured in billions rather than millions, with an estimate from the Business Visits and Events Partnership from a few years ago reckoning on a figure north of £30bn even before events and festivals were added on.

That is all in the past though. Wind forward to today and the MICE sector doesn't just find itself facing headwinds, it is battling against a howling gale.

While some may argue this is just a COVID-19 phenomenon, the truth is that the pandemic has supercharged trends that were already in train.

MICE is an enormously diverse sector, but on the fringes there has always been activity that mischievous tabloid headline writers could describe as 'fat cats enjoy a jolly', citing the contrast between executives attending conferences in exotic locations while others working for the same corporation survive on minimum wage.

Increasingly shareholders are paying attention to 'corporate citizenship' in their investment decisions, meaning business travel (and all other forms of corporate governance) is under greater scrutiny, needing to be demonstrably of value and not simply a frivolous luxury.

The fact that less attention has been paid to climate change in 2020 than in 2019 does not mean the issue has gone away. As and when travel becomes a feasible option once more its impact on emissions will return to prominence, and even if corporates feel confident in sending staff off on aeroplanes it might become increasingly unlikely those staff turn left when they board in order that the business can demonstrate it is taking steps to reduce its carbon footprint.

Earlier I eluded to the fact that the pandemic has accelerated pre-existing trends that pose a challenge to the MICE sector, and foremost among these is the adoption of technology.

For years, perhaps decades, there has been talk of people videoconferencing instead of meeting face-to-face, and such activity had already become the norm in giant tech companies. But 2020 has forced many (including some luddites) to engage in virtual meetings. If you want to see what exponential growth looks like track down a chart showing Zoom downloads in recent months.

It is absolutely true that virtual conferences, webinars and alike lack some of the serendipity, spontaneity and creativity offered by being physically in the same space as other humans, but 2020 has proven that they are doable, and as platforms become ever more responsive to user needs it feels entirely plausible to assume that even when (if) coronavirus is in the past there will have been a step change in the proportion of MICE activity taking place online.

Many of you will have heard of the 'paradox of thrift', whereby businesses are focussed on rebuilding their balance sheet after a crisis and look to cut back on all non-essential spending. Finance Directors will likely conclude that the line on the accounts entitled 'Travel' is rife for being pruned, especially as the pushback from those saying technology is not an adequate alternative have largely had their case undermined by reality.

A glimmer of optimism though, as, if appears probable, a significant uptick in the number of people who work from home becomes permanent, many businesses will be hunting for venues where teams can come together periodically, and having their own little-used but high-cost office may not be a good solution.

That means a venue offering the chance for people to be physically together (if socially distanced), that has top-notch connectivity, has abundant access to fresh air and nearby accommodation, could become highly sought after, perhaps representing a fresh opportunity for the MICE industry.

The siren voices calling for a definitive reopening date for venues that host conferences, exhibitions or events are misplaced, whereas those voices pointing out that sector-specific restrictions ought to be accompanied with sector-specific support are well-judged. Mingling was part-and-parcel of MICE activity pre-COVID, and until such time as coronavirus is no longer a threat, or society has collectively decided it will tolerate higher levels of direct and indirect mortality, the safest form of mingling is sadly through a screen.

If you want to get in touch regarding this blog please email david@scatteredclouds.co.uk

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Tourism does love an acronym, and those exposed to the sector will swiftly come across the term MICE, used as shorthand for 'Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Exhibitions'. That said, many august bodies prefer the term 'Meetings Industry', but that would have scuppered my play on words for the title for this blog...

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App could return air travel to 50% of 2019 levels

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Marriott enters work from hotel market

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Marriott joined the growing work-from-hotel trend this week, a sign the world's biggest hotel companies see offering up guest rooms as office replacements as a viable business.

The Work Anywhere with Marriott Bonvoy platform - teased earlier this month at Skift Forum Asia - includes a variety of options, from day use to multi-day, at a select number of Marriott properties. Marriott will then potentially expand it across its global portfolio, depending on demand levels at those hotels.

"That allows us to look at consumer behavior, look at operations of the hotel, and make tweaks along the way," said Peggy Roe, global officer of customer experience at Marriott. "If and when we scale it, it will be thoughtfully designed to work."

Marriott offers three tiers to Work Anywhere. The day pass allows guests to book a stay from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. at between a 25 percent to 50 percent discount off a regular overnight reservation. Guests have access to all the regular amenities of the hotel and rapid in-room Wi-Fi - a key selling point in wooing guests to work from a Marriott in lieu of a family home, Roe said.

While non-Bonvoy members are welcome to use the program, Bonvoy members earn points on their stay, a snack welcome package, and eligible members would get lounge access. Marriott offers the day use program at certain hotels in Atlanta, Dallas, Hong Kong, Kuala Lampur, London, New York City, Phoenix, Toronto, and Singapore. But the program is slated to expand within Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.

A Stay Pass - offered at nearly 2,000 hotels around the world - includes an overnight stay but also the early 6 a.m. check-in and late 6 p.m. check-out. This package also includes free breakfast and complimentary evening cocktails when available. The Play Pass for multi-day stays at participating luxury and resort properties also comes with a business concierge and supervised activities for children.

Guests are able to book any of these packages directly online.

"People have been staying in our rooms and working in our rooms forever but not in a way where it would replace their offices," Roe said. "Here, we're trying to provide a safe and secure place, experiment a little, and see what we can learn."

Striking at the Right Time

This isn't Marriott's first foray in offering its hotels as alternative places to convene for work. The Workspace on Demand program launched eight years ago, but the platform was a little ahead of its time before more people were migrating away from a traditional office to coworking platforms like WeWork.

The 2020 landscape is entirely different, as most workers are still shying away from the office and open-floorpan co-working spaces due to the pandemic.

Companies like MGM Resorts and Hyatt have all launched variations of a work-from-hotel platform to appeal to those users seeking a private place to work. Smaller California-based Proper Hospitality even partnered with an actual co-working provider, Industrious, on its own spin on using guest rooms as an office.

Hilton joined in earlier this month with Workspaces by Hilton, a day-use program offered at some of its hotels in Canada, the UK, and the U.S. Hilton's platform includes access to regular hotel amenities as well as special packages depending on the hotel.

The Conrad New York Downtown - where day rates start at $300 - package includes a $100 "zen box" as well as discounts on treatments from a nearby Clean Market wellness store, room service delivery for breakfast and lunch, and a 4 p.m. cocktail delivery. Guests at the Hilton Boston Back Bay have an in-room air purifier, shredder, printer, and a $20 food voucher as part of a day use package that starts at $99.

Marriott's work-from-hotel launch comes months after Arne Sorenson, the company's chief executive, chided major companies for extending their work-from-home policies well into next year - the idea being such moves kept workers away from the kind of corporate travel that filled up a hotel.

"While we all need to make decisions to protect our people and make sure that we're not putting people out in risky environments, there's absolutely no reason for us to be making decisions about what offices look like or what travel looks like in the second quarter of 2021," Sorenson said during an August investor call.

While there are still questions regarding the longevity of work-from-hotel programs once travel demand and room rates rebound, there are also signs the idea could last for years to come.

Forty-two percent of respondents in a Marriott focus group of more than 400 Bonvoy and non-Bonvoy members said they would consider working from a hotel as an alternative to work-from-home. There is also chatter in the commercial real estate community on whether the work-from-hotel model could serve some degree of long-term demand due to many companies scaling back their office footprints during the pandemic.

"I see flexible office being a long-term viable option in the market, with work-from-hotel a likely niche industry," Aaron Jodka, a managing director of research and client services at Colliers International, told Skift earlier this month. "If hotels can partner with established, well-recognized flexible office space providers, there are opportunities for this to carve out a post-pandemic niche in the market."

Marriott consulted with its corporate partners on its own program. While Roe declined to elaborate on specific companies, she said it was a mix of large consulting and tech firms. Those conversations also left the door open for a post-pandemic future for the Work Anywhere platform.

"They trust us to house their employees when they travel. There's no reason that wouldn't translate to allowing them to use our spaces to maybe replace their office or as an in-between when you need a quiet space to work," Roe said. "Because every hotel has to fill occupancy in a different way, this is just one more tool in [a hotel owner's] toolkit to maximize their revenue and occupancy going forward."

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Marriott Throws Hat Into the Work-From-Hotel Ring

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Marriott joined the growing work-from-hotel trend this week, a sign the world's biggest hotel companies see offering up guest rooms as office replacements as a viable business. The Work Anywhere with Marriott Bonvoy platform - teased earlier this month at Skift Forum Asia - includes a variety of options, from day use to multi-day, at a select number of Marriott properties.

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CITIZENS VOTE IN KEY WEST TO BAN LARGE CRUISE SHIPS

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CITIZENS VOTE IN KEY WEST TO BAN LARGE CRUISE SHIPS

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While Americans chose their next president by a close margin, a majority of Key West voters were united last week on three referendum votes that are now city law, preventing more than 1,500 passengers from disembarking per day, banning ships with a capacity of 1,300 or more, and giving docking priority to cruise lines with the best environmental and health records.

Key West isn't the first US port city to demand capacity limits from the cruise lines, but what's notable is that this vote emerged from an unprecedented eight-month cruise tourism pause, giving residents a rare chance to see nature bounce back in the surrounding marine sanctuary.

In a time when the focus has shifted towards conscious travel post-Covid, Key West's ban of big ships is poised to influence and potentially shift other community-cruise relationships around US and global port cities in a post-Covid world.

"It's been a real David and Goliath kind of story," Arlo Haskell, co-founder of the Key West Committee for Safer Cleaner Ships, the group behind the referendum, told Skift. "For this little tiny town to take on this massive industry that as you can see, in the share of the vote, has not been a popular industry here for a long time."

Taking Back Home and Planet

Two sets of brothers who grew up together on Key West - the Haskells and the Bensons - knew it was time to act after seeing the highly publicized coronavirus infections on cruise ships in March. What began as a public health concern for their home and a desire to limit the return of potential super-spreader crowds of cruisers, evolved into a bigger goal to save Key West's environment. Together, they collected 2,500 petition signatures from registered voters for the referendum to be placed on the ballot; it took just two weeks to get double the minimum of signatures required.

"It was public health that really got us going," Arlo Haskell told Skift. "As we moved forward, a big part of the campaign and the support from the community came about as a result of the very positive environmental changes that we were seeing in pretty short order. Within, I would say, about the three month mark, we just started to notice a real difference in the water quality around Key West."

One of the most popular cruise destinations in the Caribbean, and a Florida gateway for most cruise itineraries to the region, Key West boasts an enviable location in a national marine sanctuary, home to the only living coral reef in the continental US. In 2019, the city of approximately 25,000 people received close to one million cruise ship visitors - responsible for 6.2 percent of total tourism spending as of 2017-2018 - while overnight stays amounted to two million.

According to Haskell, Key West's unique features among Caribbean ports includes a narrow channel and shallow harbor close to the barrier reef, making it particularly vulnerable to big ships. "[W]hen these big ships come in and out, they physically disrupt the sediment at the bottom and they kick up these big silk plumes that trail the ships for seven miles until they're out into deep water," Haskell said. "So you see the immediate impact when every ship comes in and out.And then you know, day after day, up to three ships a day, it just becomes this chronic condition, that sediment just never gets to settle. "

Key West's push against cruise lines dates back to 2013, when residents also voted by an overwhelming majority against an industry driven initiative to dredge and widen the channel, which runs through the marine sanctuary. Jolly Benson led that movement, which Haskell thinks most likely woke residents to the idea that they had the power to make a change.

When the CDC's no sail ban went into effect in March, nature began restoring itself. "So people started to notice that the water quality was really improving. The ships are gone, nothing else has changed and we're seeing consistent clear water that hasn't been present here in 30 years," Haskell said. "It really brought back memories of growing up here and everybody was saying that, growing up we had lots of people in the water every day, fishermen and divers. So that kind of 'see it with your own eyes' quality really powered our support in the community to get back some of what we had."

Cruise tourism veteran Carolyn Spencer-Brown applauded Key West's voters' decision to choose what's best for their city. "[I]t's about time that people who live in a touristy place took back their community. I think it's time that we start to think about cruise tourism in a more thoughtful way. And that responsibility to me is equally, if not more so, on the ports of call themselves to determine what they are willing to invest."

Smaller, High-Value Tourism for All?

Pre-Covid, the battle of small port city communities against cruise lines and overtourism debate were raging. For Key West, the challenges come from businesses who believe they'll lose even more revenue from no cruises in 2021, after an already difficult pandemic year of no cruise tourism.

Key West native Analise Andrews, owner of Key West Food Tours and whose grandparents moved to Key West from Cuba in the 1950s, expressed feeling conflicted over the big cruise ship ban. "It's a very complex issue for me at least. I feel like it's a step in the right direction environmentally [.] Fundamentally I do care more in the long term about the environment, however it was a very extreme way to say we care about the environment," Andrews told Skift. "I feel like there should've been a plan in place for all of these locals and businesses that were going to be impacted from it versus just completing cutting it off. It's drastic and it's kicking people down in a time when we haven't had business for a while because of Covid."

Andrews said that overnight visitors often shared they were day cruisers who decided to return to Key West a year or more later, and that even the restaurants on her walking food tour will be affected. "[T]hese are small mom and pop restaurants that were like - no, actually, cruisers come here, they get off the ship and they walk a mile to this restaurant, and they eat here."

The arguments of big cruises bringing in big revenue to the destination or that cruisers eventually turn into return overnight tourists remain hotly contested among cruise and sustainable tourism experts, as is often the case in the Caribbean.

In her report on the economics of cruise tourism in Key West for Stand.earth, sustainable tourism expert Martha Honey, CEO of Responsible Travel Consulting and Director Emeritus, Center for Responsible Travel (CREST), found that Key West wasn't faring so well with cruises. "Key West is a very well developed tourism destination with a very sort of sophisticated land based tourism, and I had assumed that their cruise tourism would in a way parallel that," she said. "And in fact they are doing so badly compared to other ports of call in terms of the amount of money they're getting per cruise passenger, the amount of money they're getting In terms of docking fees, and so on. That was shocking, that they're near the bottom of the barrel."

Visit Florida had no comment on how Key West's decision would affect the state's tourism industry, deferring instead to the local tourism office for the Florida Keys. "We understand that voter approval of the three cruise ship referendums is likely to have a negative economic impact on a number of Key West tourism-related businesses," Stacey Mitchell, the director of the Monroe County Tourist Development Council (TDC), told Skift. "We're hoping that TDC's marketing program will help attract overnight, leisure travelers to Key West to help defray deficits for any affected business."

Determining Cruising Standards in A Post-Covid World

The Key West Committee for Safer and Cleaner Ships said health and safety standards will be easy for the City to determine per the CDC's Vessel Sanitation Program. But how will Key West monitor ships' environmental records?

"A place like Key West, they'd want to be really cautious," Megan Epler Wood, director of the International Sustainable Tourism Initiative at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told Skift. "I think water testing is the easiest way to show what the problems are. They need to do water quality testing in the cruise port that looks at the specific chemicals that are associated with the emissions from the scrubbers."

Reducing ship sizes and limiting crowds are also likely to moot the bulk of environmental risks. "The controlling depth in our harbor is about 28.5 feet and we used to get a lot of ships that draw 26-27 feet," Haskell said. "And going forward the small ships that qualify, the average is less than 20 feet so it's a major difference in terms of immediate bottom impacts. And then of course in terms of waste water discharge, air emissions, it goes down when the size of the ship goes down. It's the size restrictions themselves that are the most potent environmental benefit."

Port Communities Eyeing Key West Result

The Key West community's clear "no" against big ships, particularly on the environmental aspect, quickly echoed across global port cities, sending a wave of optimism among activists from Alaska to the Caribbean, even in the current economic downturn.

"I definitely think that we now have an opportunity for a big shift, and I'm working with others in the community to start doing some serious organizing," Karla Hart, an activist in Juneau, Alaska, told Skift. "I have a list of 11 initiatives that I'm brainstorming."

Hart is also the co-founder of a first-ever Global Cruise Activist Network (GCAN). Made up of a coalition of port city activists and cruising experts from around the US and the world who first connected during the lockdown, GCAN officially launched in September. The network meets bi-weekly to share knowledge and exchange ideas in creating a better cruise tourism future for their respective port cities, one that protects the environment and communities from overtourism. GCAN is preparing to launch a "Rethink before Restart" campaign addressing cruise lines, but also explaining the regenerative travel concept to Juneau residents and the possibility of reinventing the industry.

From the Cayman Islands, Linda Clark, who joins GCAN's bi-weekly meetings, also felt encouraged by Key West's result. She campaigned last year to prevent a large port from being built in George Town Harbour just for large cruises. "[I]t would decimate 32 acres of our coral reef systems which have been scientifically shown to be the healthiest in the Caribbean." A people-initiated referendum on the cruise berthing facility construction was signed into law in 2018, but locals have been waiting ever since for a date to be set for voting, with the Government stating that the project was dropped while cruise lines haven't corroborated. Residents are hoping the referendum will happen in 2021, under a new government.

"We already get 600 ships per year with 1.9 million passengers and our local population is 65,000 people," Clark told Skift. "The ships come into Grand Cayman and the square miles is 76 so it's a very small place to have 1.9 million, plus the stayover, plus the resident population which has also escalated. We just don't have the space, we don't have the carrying capacity or the infrastructure."

Legal Battles Ahead

With the Key West referendum provisions now city law, what awaits Key West and the Safer Cleaner Ships Committee is a lawsuit in state court by the private pier owner over the new cruise limiting provisions. Prior attempts to block the referendum being placed on the ballot failed in federal court and in state court. The state judge postponed a decision on any of the underlying legal issues and the case is expected to resume soon.

Cruise ships have yet to publicly address the Key West vote, save for a general comment last week that they were willing to have a dialogue with the destination. Skift's attempts to reach the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) and cruise lines went unanswered, while Oceania Cruises deferred any comment to CLIA and the Key West government.

"We do hope to work with CLIA to really make Key West the Caribbean's premier small ship destination," Haskell told Skift. "We campaigned on bringing small ships here in lieu of the big ships and we're serious about trying to do that. We want it to work out as well as possible for everybody." Haskell reiterated the committee's support for the city in any upcoming lawsuits, including raising funds to bring experts and lawyers to the table to make it work out for everyone.

A Potential Precedent-Setting Vote

As the big cruise lines prepare to meet the CDC's conditional sailing requirements so they can sail again as early as January - putting out notices to travel agents who want to be part of the test sail with crew - the eventual legal outcome will determine whether Key West will see any big cruises at all next year at its one private pier and whether the absence of big ships will be offset by higher overnight tourism.

"We have about 300 restaurants on this little 2×4 mile island," Andrews said. "The only reason locals like me are able to have all these beautiful benefits of living here, of restaurants and things to do is because tourists support that. All of these businesses can't rely just on locals."

Haskell believes the future lies in overnight tourism, as well as smaller ships that can better partner with Key West's powerful overnight tourism. "We love people who love Key West, but we want tourism where the economic benefits are in balance with the impact to environment and infrastructure, and everything else, and that's what you don't see with the cruise industry."

In the meantime, Key West's historic vote has placed the conversation of overtourism back front and center during an unusual time of heightened concerns over the return of cruises on the public health, and over how to "do better" for the environment and local communities when travel restarts. In other words, this result has all the makings for a precedent-setting shift in cruise tourism post-Covid.

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Key West's Big Ship Ban Signals a Major Shift Ahead for Cruise Tourism

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While Americans chose their next president by a close margin, a majority of Key West voters were united last week on three referendum votes that are now city law, preventing more than 1,500 passengers from disembarking per day, banning ships with a capacity of 1,300 or more, and giving docking priority to cruise lines with the best environmental and health records.

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O'LEARY FORECASTS VACCINE WILL BRING AIRCRAFT DEMAND BACK TO NEAR NORMAL BY SUMMER

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O'LEARY FORECASTS VACCINE WILL BRING AIRCRAFT DEMAND BACK TO NEAR NORMAL BY SUMMER

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BBC 'Bottom Line' programme talks to representatives of businesses from aviation, conferences and events and the night club sector about the impact of COVID19

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How are industries like live music, travel, conferences and events coping with the pandemic recession - and what plans do they have for survival?

How are industries like live music, travel, conferences and events coping with the pandemic recession - and what plans do they have for survival? These business sectors have been hit disproportionately hard by the dramatic changes in our ways of life. In a programme recorded before the recent announcement of an apparently successful vaccine trial, Evan Davis discusses with business leaders from across these industries.
Producer: Julie Ball

GUESTS

Tim Hawkins, Chief Strategy Officer, Manchester Airports Group

Charlotte Gough, Divisional Director, Corporates, MCI Group

Peter Marks, Chief Executive, The Deltic Group

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BBC Radio 4 - The Bottom Line, Sector Shutdown

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How are industries like live music, travel, conferences and events coping with the pandemic recession - and what plans do they have for survival? How are industries like live music, travel, conferences and events coping with the pandemic recession - and what plans do they have for survival?

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During the first UK lockdown I received an email from my son's primary school with a list of webcams we might enjoy having a look at. We particularly enjoyed watching and identifying the animals at a particular African watering hole that we could watch, live, online.

I continued exploring this world of live-streamed place-based webcams, something I had previously overlooked. I was fascinated by those focusing on city centres, which revealed largely deserted urban landscapes. I left nature-cams and coastal webcams open on my PC monitor as welcome distractions as I worked from home. They offered me a portal to the outside world, when I, like so many others, was trapped inside.

I suspected I was not alone in my virtual travels. Indeed, the media soon described a massive upsurge in the usage of these webcams. Edinburgh Zoo saw its webcam views surge from about 100,000 to 5 million per month. As an expert in tourism, I wanted to explore this further. I set up a questionnaire and heard from 227 members of the public about their experiences travelling through webcams.

Some had used webcam-travel for years, as a way to connect to nature. One respondent described the appeal of his favourite webcam at an eagle's nest:

I enjoy watching the eggs hatch and observing the eaglets mature over springtime, learning to fly, and leaving the next. I find it a nice antidote to the urban environment in which I live and work.

Respondents found webcam-travel relaxing, especially when the subject was nature and wildife - "It makes me feel calm and relaxed when I'm stressed or feeling anxious". Coastal scenes were also very popular. One person told me:

I always found, in the time before the lockdown, looking at the sea to be relaxing. I really miss walking by the coast. Watching the waves helps me to feel more connected with the outside world and reminds of me what is waiting once it is safe to venture out once more.

One thing that these accounts revealed was the importance of the live and unfiltered nature of webcam-travel: "It helps to keep in touch with places and things I like. Also watching in real-time makes you feel almost as if [you are] there." The live nature of the experience seemed to facilitate a sense of connection.

Virtual travel

The places which are visited virtually, through these predominantly static webcams, are varied, numerous and increasingly popular. Wildlife settings, coastal scenes, city centres, zoos, aquariums and countryside are all favourites.

This increase in popularity is unsurprising given the events of 2020. This year, our freedoms have been restricted in a way most people have never experienced. In this context, webcam-travel is a way to connect to nature and the outdoors.

Brockholes Nature Reserve, Lancashire, told me that they saw 850 views of their two nature-cams in February 2020 but two months later, in April, this number had increased to 13,917 - a rise of 1,537%. The company SkylineWebcams, meanwhile, have over 1,000 place-based webcams around the globe showing city centres, heritage sites and a variety of resorts. In May, they told me that they too had seen an enormous rise in popularity of their webcams, saying:

With the spread of COVID-19 our site has, in fact, witnessed an increase in numbers, rising from an average of 70 million monthly page views to 120 million in March. Webcams have definitely played an interesting role during lockdown, they have connected individuals to both distant countries and areas of their very own cities they would usually attend on a day-to-day basis.

My research supported these reports: I found that nearly a third of the respondents tried webcam-travel for the first time during lockdown, and 64% were viewing webcams for longer periods of time than normal. 69% said they were more likely to physically visit places they had viewed through webcams, when restrictions were lifted.

Webcam travel therefore provides a relatively affordable way for tourism organisations to connect with visitors as recovery looms. 90% of respondents felt a sense of connection to place or nature and 83% felt more positive after webcam travel.

Of the two-thirds who tended to view webcams of places that they already knew before lockdown, 83% said that this experience brought back happy memories. One wrote of his favourite webcam at Arnside: "A beautiful and unspoiled place in Cumbria - each time I look at it, it evokes very happy memories of lovely visits there." Nostalgia can ward off negative feelings such as loneliness, boredom and stress. This offers refuge against the challenges, anxieties and frustrations associated with lockdown.

The subjects of many of the webcams are outdoor natural settings or wildlife related. Environmental psychology offers insights which help explain this appeal. It has been proven that exposure to natural environments offers wellness related benefits associated with positive feelings such as calm, refreshment and enjoyment. Even exposure to pictures of natural environments can be linked to mood restoration.

In 2020, webcam-travel offers a feeling of control over our movements, allowing us to exercise our freedom - at least virtually if not corporeally. Yet the experience is an uplifting one. It seems to be relaxing and improves mood at a time when there are widespread concerns regarding mental health, offering an unfiltered experience which supplements and supports connection to place and nature.

As our freedom of movement continues to be curtailed due to COVID-19, webcam travel seems set to continue. This may strike some as depressing, but webcam-travel is not just way to cope via escapism or nostalgia: it allows a connection to places we know or plan to explore sometime in 2021.

Such imaginative travel can allow us to catch a glimpse of a more positive future. It also offers an opportunity to the tourism sector to connect to its customers as it considers how to recover. And connecting with nature, albeit virtually, is no bad thing for us, the wildlife charities who share their nature-cams, or the planet.

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The year of virtual travel: the benefits of exploring the world through webcams

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During the first UK lockdown I received an email from my son's primary school with a list of webcams we might enjoy having a look at. We particularly enjoyed watching and identifying the animals at a particular African watering hole that we could watch, live, online.

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Airlines say they need continued support post vaccine availability

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Travel may start to rebound in the months ahead as effective Covid vaccines are distributed and administered. That should mean the airline industry can breathe a sigh of relief - not so fast, the industry says. More government aid is needed to bridge the gap between now and when consumers start to travel in significant numbers.

Governments around the world have stepped up during the crisis, to the tune of $173 billion to airlines since the pandemic began, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said. Aid has taken a variety of forms, from direct cash infusions, loans, payroll support, and subsidies for operating essential routes.

But IATA noted aid has been uneven around the world. Some governments, like Singapore, lavished financial support to airlines. Governments in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and North America (most recently in Canada) have offered various degrees of support.

Others, like those in Latin America, have not given much at all. Peter Cerdá, IATA's regional vice president for the Americas, told Airline Weekly that there is a lingering sense in the region that air travel is the preserve of the rich and therefore not as deserving of government support as other sectors.

Even in countries where the airline industry has received aid, much of it has expired, and airlines are angling for more. In the U.S., airline payroll support through the CARES Act federal stimulus expired in October, and more than 30,000 airline workers have lost their jobs. Airlines are angling for more aid to carry them through March, but Congress remains deadlocked on whether more fiscal stimulus is necessary at all.

IATA is calling for more worldwide and has recommended a variety of methods governments can use to support the industry. These include waiving taxes and fees; subsidizing routes; financial incentives to operate certain flights or providing a certain number of seats on a route; buying tickets directly to distribute to government employees or to citizens to stimulate future travel; and subsidizing tickets. The governments of Hong Kong, Greece, Thailand, and Cyprus, among others, have used these tools to stimulate their domestic travel industries, IATA notes.

These may be more palatable to the public now than further direct cash infusions to airlines. To cite one example, when Congress considered giving airlines more aid, the blowback on more aid to large corporations (while Congress dithered on extending unemployment benefits) was harsh and immediate. In Europe, aid to airlines is becoming politically untenable, and even the outspoken Ryanair CEO Michael O'Leary has derided it as unnecessary.

The conventional wisdom, reinforced by airline leaders around the world, is that vaccinations would save the day, and once enough people had been inoculated, travel would return. And that may be true, but the industry argues that it needs more aid until that critical mass of people begin flying again. "Any government stands to benefit by including proven stimulus measures into their economic recovery plans," IATA Director General Alexandre de Juniac said. "When people travel, economies prosper and grow."

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Do Airlines Need More Government Aid Now That Vaccines Are Here?

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Travel may start to rebound in the months ahead as effective Covid vaccines are distributed and administered. That should mean the airline industry can breathe a sigh of relief - not so fast, the industry says. More government aid is needed to bridge the gap between now and when consumers start to travel in significant ...

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Eventbrite Report

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A meaningful shift online

What accounts for these numbers? While nothing can replace the experience of live events in-person, virtual events have proved to be an excellent substitute. Eventbrite commissioned YouGov to conduct a global consumer survey of over 3,000 consumers in Australia, the UK, and the US. We found that 47% of respondents across all three countries agreed that online events are a good alternative to in-person events. In the UK, out of those who have attended an online event since the pandemic started, 53% agreed. Perhaps that's because roughly 48% of those who've attended online events here reported feeling more connected to others afterwards.

Tellingly, more than half of respondents (53%) in Australia, the UK, and the US said they plan to attend both virtual and in-person events in the future - even when it is safe to gather in-person again. And event creators have taken notice.

"We are thrilled to have cultivated a sizable online audience for our programming," said Dana Blanchard, head of publicity and marketing for publishing house Haymarket Books. With more than 26,000 subscribers on the company's YouTube channel - many of them new - Blanchard said that Haymarket is planning to expand its online programming even further in spring 2021. "It's exciting to create a space where people can come together," she said.

Personal development, entertainment, and social justice: How people choose online events

Our platform data from 2020 indicates that virtual business and professional events reigned supreme in most markets. Together, they comprised a quarter of our global online inventory for 2020. Half of these events were in the format of a seminar, talk, class, training, or workshop. This suggests that as the year continued - and traditional, in-person avenues for personal growth stagnated - people remained hungry for personal development.

Events related to film, media, and entertainment also boomed. Escapism, it seems, was a major draw amid the challenges of 2020. We know this because the number of these online events stayed strong, with a remarkable 2,000-3,000 of them taking place each month since April. The numbers for visual and performing arts events are even more striking: Creators hosted nearly 4,000 such events in April and that trended upward throughout the year, growing by 74% from April to November.

The ascent of other event categories also hints at broader global shifts. In the US, Australia, and the UK, virtual mental health events proved popular. It's hard to imagine that the trend isn't a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the following social and economic fallout. In the UK, demand for mental health virtual events seemed closely linked to lockdown periods, with interest peaking in May, dipping in August, and rising again through October.

According to our survey, 48% of US respondents said they have become more informed on social justice issues and political issues since the pandemic. This mirrors what we've seen on our platform: Three of our most-attended virtual events of 2020 centred on social justice. "Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist" took the top spot, with more than 277,000 people registered to attend. Our ninth-ranked virtual event, "Uplifting Women and Girls of Color Through Antiracist Pedagogy, Practice, and Policies," drew over 56,000 attendees.

How event creators made money

Prior to the pandemic, virtual events were not considered central to many of our creators' businesses. But when COVID-19 hit, and many of our interactions shifted online, the virtual realm became a natural place for our creators to convene. While at first, they were unsure if they could generate value from virtual events, as the pandemic continued, our creators felt more comfortable charging for these events - and attendees were willing to pay. Sports and fitness events (anything from junior football games and yoga classes to quidditch leagues and walkathons) consistently recorded the highest share of paid tickets for virtual events, with about ⅓ of all events being paid for. As gyms and sports leagues shut down, and people missed the camaraderie of physical events, the share of paid tickets and the number of attendees increased.

Virtual events in the spheres of film, media, and entertainment also raked in more income, with the percentage of paid tickets in that category more than doubling from 16% in March to 34.4% in November. For example, by October, at least a third of all virtual museum tours charged a fee - a stark shift from April, when almost all of them were free. This may be proof that people are willing to pay for previously free content - especially when the physical doors of theatres, museums, and other venues remain shut.

Some event creators are developing best practices for hosting more profitable events . One successful method we've seen is event creators leveraging the power of their guests and hosts. "The artists who do the most to help us promote their event have the largest audiences," explained Vito Rinaldo, a retired teacher turned entrepreneur, who founded the virtual concert venue TOF Productions this year. He'll encourage future artists to tell others about his venue in 2021. Because Rinaldo can track attendee data from recurring events with Eventbrite, he's seen trends that allow him and his artists to maximise their returns. "Thursdays falling before holiday weekends see a reduced attendance for obvious reasons," he said. "We plan to avoid scheduling on those dates in 2021."

Virtual travel helped creators reach new audiences

A major factor in the success of online events may be global attendance. We've found that virtual events hosted in the US and UK have attracted more than 30% of their attendees from other locations around the globe. Since there are no physical limitations on where attendees can be located, virtual events give creators a greater global reach. In the absence of language barriers and time zone constraints, there's nothing stopping a person in Osaka, Japan, from attending a virtual lecture in Manchester.

Since starting to host virtual events in mid-March, New York Adventure Club's audience has more than doubled: "70% come from the Greater New York Area, but around 25% are other domestic 'visitors' from coast to coast. A smaller fraction is international viewers, though I'm sure it would grow if we offered events at times of day that better suited them." It's clear from William's audience that the appetite to "visit" New York through one of the club's virtual webinars is strong.

Due to the success he's seen expanding his audience through virtual tourism, Schneider has no plans to slow down. "I plan to restart our in-person events with the goal of complementing our virtual side of the business. I'm still figuring out the details of the rollout, but I feel the future is a hybrid approach."

Looking to 2021

With the future of COVID-19 still uncertain, virtual events are likely to remain a popular supplement to in-person events. The results of our Inside Look Report suggest that creators may miss out on a promising growth opportunity if they don't start offering online events alongside in-person events. When the pandemic eventually draws to a close, creators who have a strong online presence may be able to leverage their demonstrated success and established online audiences to improve their businesses' long-term bottom line. But the benefits of online programming go beyond financial incentives.

"Perhaps the silver lining of this pandemic is that online events have the power to globally engage communities in new ways, helping creators bring people together from small communities to far-reaching corners of the world," shared Julia Hartz, co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite. "That's something to celebrate as we continue to work toward the safe return of in-person events."

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Eventbrite's Inside Look Report: Online Events Are Here to Stay - Eventbrite UK

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What accounts for these numbers? While nothing can replace the experience of live events in-person, virtual events have proved to be an excellent substitute. Eventbrite commissioned YouGov to conduct a global consumer survey of over 3,000 consumers in Australia, the UK, and the US.

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PUBS TO STAY CLOSED TILL MAY - SEE ALSO DEMAND FOR TRAVEL FROM DIFFERENT MARKET SEGMENTS

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PUBS TO STAY CLOSED TILL MAY - SEE ALSO DEMAND FOR TRAVEL FROM DIFFERENT MARKET SEGMENTS

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Govt talking to hotel chains about taking over properties

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A decision on tightening border rules to curb new variants of Covid-19 is expected to be made tomorrow by Boris Johnson.

The introduction of quarantine hotels for everyone entering the UK is a key option under consideration.

Health secretary Matt Hancock made the case for a blanket ban yesterday, warning that it was impossible to predict where new and potentially vaccine-resistant strains of the virus might come from.

He told Times Radio: "It is because of the new variants that we're more worried about international travel.

"The critical thing is to make sure we protect ourselves from a new variant that might not respond as effectively to the vaccine."

The travel and aviation industries fear that blanket travel restrictions would kill off the summer holiday season.
The government was last week urged to extend support for airports affected by the closure of UK travel corridors to the wider travel industry. A further tightening of international travel restrictions was flagged after home secretary Priti Patel warned that it was "far too early" to consider booking summer holidays.
The prime minister has not ruled out bringing in tougher measures at UK borders, telling a Downing Street news conference on Friday: "We don't want to put that (efforts to control Covid) at risk by having a new variant come back in."

A meeting of the government's Covid operations committee on Tuesday will determine what new border measures are needed to prevent new strains of the virus jeopardising the mass vaccination programme.

Home Office proposals reportedly being drawn up would mean all arrivals into UK airports and ports would be escorted to designated Covid-19 hotels where they would be expected to remain for ten days.

They would need to have another negative test before being allowed to leave.

Talks are being held with hotel chains about taking over properties.

Officials are confident that they can find enough capacity to accommodate all arrivals, currently totalling 10,000 a day, The Times reported.

However, another report suggested a shortage of rooms at airports would mean arrivals having to be taken to hotels around the country.

The plans are similar to those introduced by Australia and New Zealand at an early stage of the pandemic.

All remaining quarantine-free travel corridors were suspended last week in response to concerns about new variants of Covid-19, meaning that arrivals have to produce a negative test taken within the previous 72 hours and enter isolation for up to ten days.

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All post are the individual views of the respective commenter and are not the expressed views of Travel Weekly.
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Quarantine hotels expected as part of tough new border restrictions | Travel Weekly

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A decision on tightening border rules to curb new variants of Covid-19 is expected to be made tomorrow by Boris Johnson. The introduction of quarantine hotels for everyone entering the UK is a key option under consideration.

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Glastonbury 2021 is officially cancelled, the festival's organisers have announced.

"With great regret, we must announce that this year's Glastonbury festival will not take place, and that this will be another enforced fallow year for us," organisers Michael and Emily Eavis said in a statement. "In spite of our efforts to move heaven and earth, it has become clear that we simply will not be able to make the festival happen this year. We are so sorry to let you all down."

The event will not be rescheduled for this year. Information for ticket holders is available on the festival's website. "We are very confident we can deliver something really special for us all in 2022!" the Eavises said.

The decision came down to the wire: on 4 January, Emily Eavis said there was no news and that the event wasn't cancelled, denying claims made by Spice Girl Mel B on BBC Radio 5 Live that it had been.

Culture secretary Oliver Dowden wrote in a statement: "I share the disappointment of everyone that Glastonbury won't be going ahead this year. This regrettable but understandable decision is recognition that public health comes first." He said the government were looking at "problems around getting insurance" for festivals, with many organisers calling for a government-backed insurance scheme to help them continue to plan their events with greater confidence.

Paul Reed, CEO of the Association of Independent Festivals (Glastonbury is not a member of AIF), wasn't surprised by the decision to cancel, which could have mixed ramifications for the rest of the British festival circuit. "You have to consider its global and cultural significance - it's the largest green-field festival in the world, and it could set the tone in terms of public confidence for festivals going ahead this year."

However, Reed stressed that Glastonbury's size - with a capacity of 210,000 - made it an outlier. "There are 975 festivals in the UK. Though some of the larger events will be making decisions this month as to whether they go ahead, for many of the smaller ones the cut-off will be later."

A recent AIF survey said that the average "go or no-go" decision date for its smaller festivals was the end of March. It takes a minimum of six to eight months to stage a festival, said Reed, and it costs "anything between £500,000 to plan a 5,000-capacity festival to £12m for a 70,000-capacity festival, which is why we've been asking the government to intervene on government-backed insurance and give us some sense of a timeframe on reopening."

UK festival organisers have said they face cancellation and possible financial ruin if the government does not institute an insurance scheme to protect them from bankruptcy in the event of cancellation owing to the pandemic, similar to a scheme that has kept TV and film productions in business.

MP Julian Knight, chair of the DCMS committee that is helming an inquiry into the survival of festivals after the pandemic, said the news was "devastating".

"We have repeatedly called for ministers to act to protect our world-renowned festivals like this one with a government-backed insurance scheme. Our plea fell on deaf ears and now the chickens have come home to roost. The jewel in the crown will be absent but surely the government cannot ignore the message any longer - it must act now to save this vibrant and vital festivals sector."
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Reed concluded that it was too soon to tell whether the festival season "is on or off". A second year of cancellations left many at "the real risk of not returning", he said.

A smaller festival season was "inevitable" in 2021, Anna Wade, director of communications and strategy for Hampshire's Boomtown Fair, told the recent parliamentary inquiry hearing into the future of festivals after the pandemic.
Topics

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Glastonbury 2021 officially cancelled due to Covid pandemic

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Glastonbury 2021 is officially cancelled, the festival's organisers have announced. "With great regret, we must announce that this year's Glastonbury festival will not take place, and that this will be another enforced fallow year for us," organisers Michael and Emily Eavis said in a statement.

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Mature holidaymakers are "hungry to travel", according to Saga Holidays' chief executive, as the over-50s specialist unveiled its 2021-22 brochures.

"Older customers were the first hit but they will be the first to get the vaccinations; there is a sense of optimism," said Chris Simmonds. "They will be the first to travel."

The operator has launched four brochures, covering the UK and Ireland; Europe and Mediterranean; long-haul holidays in the Travellers World range; and river cruises.

New options include Turkey; no-fly tours in Italy; a tour following the Great Migration through Tanzania and Kenya; and tracking gorillas through the jungles of Uganda.

The Travellers World range has been extended to cover the whole of 2022 as customers wanting long-haul trips are booking further in advance than those seeking short-haul tours.

Saga will also see the inaugural voyage for its first purpose-built river cruise ship, Spirit of the Rhine, at the end of March.

Simmonds said UK and Ireland bookings are doing well while long-haul holidays are looking strong for 2022.

The first Saga departures will be in spring, although re-start dates are under constant review.

The lockdown means that sales through agencies are down year-on-year as customers cannot visit their local agent, Simmonds added.

"The trade are still selling for us but with shops shut, we have to be realistic," he said.

"We are optimistic as the vaccines are rolling out and people are hungry to travel."

The new ITV travel show, South Africa with Gregg Wallace, is being sponsored by Saga and is prompting inquiries for late 2021 and 2022.

Long-term winter stays are proving popular for next winter and many clients are considering once-in-a-lifetime trips to destinations such as Uzbekistan and Uganda.

"They are very adventurous and thinking about spoiling themselves - there is the desire to spend," said Simmonds.

"There will be a surge once it's clear when people are able travel."

He highlighted Saga's 'Reassurance Promise' which includes travel insurance and flexible cancellation cover which includes coronavirus.

The operator has also extended its free amendment policy to 60 days before departure if customers book by February 28.

Simmonds took up his role in January 2020, just weeks before the pandemic hit.

He paid tribute to the resilience and flexibility of his colleagues and the way they switched to working from home.

"It was an extraordinary feat, very tough, but we have always been a resilient industry and always face uncertainty," he said.

More: Saga creates 'Once-in-a-lifetime' collection

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All post are the individual views of the respective commenter and are not the expressed views of Travel Weekly.
By posting your comments you agree to accept our Terms & Conditions.

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Saga clients will be 'among the first' to start travelling again | Travel Weekly

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Mature holidaymakers are "hungry to travel", according to Saga Holidays' chief executive, as the over-50s specialist unveiled its 2021-22 brochures. "Older customers were the first hit but they will be the first to get the vaccinations; there is a sense of optimism," said Chris Simmonds. "They will be the first to travel."

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After the news that British residents arriving in England from Covid hotspots will have to quarantine in hotels, many would-be holidaymakers are thinking of opting for UK destinations this summer.

Understandably, they don't want to undergo the "managed isolation process" requiring them to spend 10 days in a hotel on their return to the UK.

But there may be a shortage of the kind of UK accommodation they are looking for, say providers of holiday lets.

From cottages to campsites, demand is on the increase. Even the UK's luxury hotels are expecting the move to give them a boost.

Sarah and Steve Jarvis, who run the Independent Cottages website listing more than 1,800 properties, say inquiries during the current lockdown in England are 300% up on the first lockdown in March to July 2020.

However, they also point out that many properties still need to honour bookings that were rolled over from 2020 because of earlier virus curbs, restricting availability for new requests.

"People started the year with bookings already in the calendar," Sarah told the BBC. "We're going to end up in a situation where we have demand outstripping supply again."

"It's almost like the perfect storm," adds Steve. "People will be hesitant about going abroad with the new travel restrictions and the UK is looking like a very good option.

"People have got confidence in UK self-catering holidays, because the bookings are coming in thick and fast."

In normal times, says Sarah, people are looking for accommodation for an average of four people to go away on holiday together.

But at the moment, they are getting lots of inquiries for groups of up to nine people, as extended families or groups of friends seek to make up for the family Christmas celebrations they missed out on.

"Families are going to go away and they want to take their parents with them," Sarah says. "It's a safe option for elderly relatives."

Unusually, some are also booking ahead for next Christmas already.

"Straight after Boxing Day, people usually start thinking about summer holidays, but we're also seeing very early bookings for the festive season," says Steve.

Another holiday provider, holidaycottages.co.uk, says it has seen a sharp increase in demand since mid-January.

The firm's chief marketing officer, James Starkey, says: "In the past week, bookings taken for May half-term onwards are up 39% compared to last year, with the summer holidays up 98%.

We do still have just over half of our properties available for seven-night breaks in the summer holidays but, with them booking more quickly this year, we anticipate another strong summer for the UK staycation industry."

At Trencreek Holiday Park in Newquay, Cornwall, there is definitely a pick-up in interest from holidaymakers.

The park offers a mixture of camping and self-catering accommodation, covering a wide range of travel needs.

"Since Monday, the phone's been getting a lot busier," says Julliette Hautot, who runs the business with her husband.

"The calls are on the up and it's definitely going to be busy for the summer," she told the BBC.

"Slots are filling up for July and August. There's not a lot left, especially for the school holidays."

She is also noticing more inquiries for September than usual, perhaps reflecting a feeling that pandemic restrictions will ease later rather than sooner.

Safety first

Hotels are noticing the staycation trend as well. The Best Western chain has just done a survey of 6,000 of its UK customers and found that 90% of them felt safer holidaying in Britain this summer rather than abroad.

"With the worries around quarantine, we are now starting to see bookings landing for the big summer months coming through in the last 24 hours," spokesperson Andrew Denton told the BBC.

"The experience of last summer has taught people not to leave it to the last minute as Britain gets booked, so to book ahead and quit worrying about quarantine, which might impact an international trip."

At the upper end of the spectrum, the UK's luxury hotels are anticipating opportunities as a result of the hotel quarantine measures for international travel.

Pride of Britain Hotels, a collection of 50 of independently-owned luxury hotels including the Athenaeum in London's Mayfair, says the measures are set to benefit home-grown tourism.

"Anything that makes international travel more difficult will clearly add to the appeal of a holiday taken within one's own country this year," said the consortium's chief executive, Peter Hancock.

"For luxury hotels in the UK, we believe there is huge pent-up demand that is just waiting for the restrictions to be eased.

"It could be a brilliant summer for domestic tourism, marking a desperately-needed return to profitability in our sector."

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UK holiday boom: Bookings 'coming in thick and fast'

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After the news that British residents arriving in England from Covid hotspots will have to quarantine in hotels, many would-be holidaymakers are thinking of opting for UK destinations this summer. Understandably, they don't want to undergo the "managed isolation process" requiring them to spend 10 days in a hotel on their return to the UK.

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WILL THE VIRUS EVOLVE TO BECOME LESS DEADLY?

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WILL THE VIRUS EVOLVE TO BECOME LESS DEADLY?

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New research suggests vaccine is a better bet than evolution.

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A recent modelling study painted a reassuring picture of a post-pandemic future in which SARS-CoV-2 transitions, over "a few years to a few decades", from dangerous pathogen to just another common-cold coronavirus. This predicted loss of virulence, the authors stress, is based on a specific idiosyncrasy of the virus, namely that it rarely causes serious disease in children.

Still, many experts agreed that we should not be in the least surprised by the authors' conclusion, as all viruses "become more transmissible and less pathogenic over time". After all, the seductive logic goes, from an evolutionary perspective it makes no sense for a pathogen to harm the host on which it depends for its survival. According to this reasoning, virulence is little more than a temporary evolutionary imbalance.

This comfortable chain of reasoning was rudely broken by the announcement of "a realistic possibility" that the new highly transmissible B117 variant "is associated with an increased risk of death".

Although the evidence is still accruing, early estimates from Nervtag, the UK's New and Emerging Respiratory Virus Threats Advisory Group, suggest that B117 may be around 30% more deadly.

But perhaps this is a single exception to an otherwise well-observed rule, and we can still be confident that SARS-CoV-2 will slowly fade away to obscurity. So what is the evidence for this view? And how confident can we be in predicting how evolution will shape the relationship between a pathogen and its host?

Law of declining virulence

It was the bacteriologist and comparative pathologist Theobald Smith (1859-1934) who began the narrative of the "law of declining virulence" in the late 19th century.

Studying tick-borne disease of cattle during the 1880s, Smith realised that the severity of the disease was determined by the degree of prior infection. Cattle that had been repeatedly exposed to the pathogen suffered from much more moderate disease than cattle encountering it for the first time. Smith reasoned that this was because host and pathogen conspired over time towards a mutually benign relationship.

The story then takes a distinctly antipodean turn. In 1859, the year Charles Darwin published his Big Idea, European rabbits were introduced to Australia for sport, with devastating consequences for the indigenous flora and fauna. Having turned down Louis Pasteur's offer of mass délapinsation using fowl cholera as a biological control agent, the Department of Agriculture turned to the myxoma virus that causes the lethal, but highly species-specific disease, myxomatosis in rabbits.

By the 1950s, the myxoma virus was spreading rapidly among the rabbit population. Recognising the opportunities provided by this unique experiment, the virologist Frank Fenner documented how the virulence of the disease decreased over a few years from 99.5% mortality to about 90%. This was taken as strong empirical evidence in support of Smith's law of declining virulence - and occasionally still is.

Queensland State Archives/Wikimedia Commons

A challenge to the law of declining virulence

At around the same time, a talented young Australian mathematician named Robert May came across the work of his compatriot Charles Birch, an eminent ecologist working on the regulation of animal populations. Together with epidemiologist Roy Anderson, May went on to pioneer the application of mathematical modelling to the ecology and evolution of infectious disease. By the late 1970s, May and Anderson had developed the " trade-off " model for the evolution of virulence - the first conceptual framework in 100 years to challenge the Smith's general law of declining virulence.

The trade-off model recognises that pathogen virulence will not necessarily limit the ease by which a pathogen can transmit from one host to another. It might even enhance it. Without the assumed evolutionary cost to virulence, there is no reason to believe that disease severity will decrease over time. Instead, May and Anderson proposed that the optimal level of virulence for any given pathogen will be determined by a range of factors, such as the availability of susceptible hosts, and the length of time between infection and symptom onset.

This last factor is a key aspect of the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2. The long time period between infection and death (if it occurs) means that SARS-CoV-2 has a significant window in which to replicate and spread, long before it kills its current host.

The trade-off model is now widely accepted. It emphasises that each host-pathogen combination must be considered individually. There is no general evolutionary law for predicting how these relationships will pan out, and certainly no justification for evoking the inevitability of decreased virulence.

There is little or no direct evidence that virulence decreases over time. While newly emerged pathogens, such as HIV and Mers, are often highly virulent, the converse is not true. There are plenty of ancient diseases, such as tuberculosis and gonorrhoea, that are probably just as virulent today as they ever were.

A change in conditions can also drive the trend in the other direction. Dengue fever has afflicted humans since at least the 18th century, but an increasingly large and mobile human population is thought to have driven a marked increase in virulence over the last 50 years or so. Even the seminal case of the rabbit-killing myxoma virus is uncertain. There was little subsequent decline in virulence after Fenner's early reports, and it may even have risen slightly.

Plausible but not inevitable

Of course, these counter-examples do not in themselves present evidence that the virulence of SARS-CoV-2 will not decline. Declining virulence is certainly plausible as one of many potential outcomes under the trade-off model.

Conversely, mutations might simultaneously heighten both virulence and transmissibility by increasing viral replication rate. Although we will have to wait for more evidence to be certain - and the precise mechanisms may be difficult to pin down - the emerging evidence around the B117 variant currently points more towards increased mortality.

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Will coronavirus really evolve to become less deadly?

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A recent modelling study painted a reassuring picture of a post-pandemic future in which SARS-CoV-2 transitions, over "a few years to a few decades", from dangerous pathogen to just another common-cold coronavirus. This predicted loss of virulence, the authors stress, is based on a specific idiosyncrasy of the virus, namely that it rarely causes serious disease in children.

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IMPACT OF CHANGING WORKING HABITS ON TOWNS AND CITY CENTRES

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IMPACT OF CHANGING WORKING HABITS ON TOWNS AND CITY CENTRES

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With remote working, local economies are likely to shift to suburbs and small towns, with knock on effects on cafes, pubs and entertainment

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Look familiar? fizes

City centres lying empty because so many people are working from home have received considerable media attention since the pandemic took hold. As the picture of a post-COVID world slowly comes into focus, it seems we are unlikely to return to the office in the same numbers as before. Large companies such as Aviva, Dropbox and Facebook have already committed to continuing remote working in the years to come.

This has important implications for where economic activity takes place. Not only will it affect city centres, it also means that many residential neighbourhoods are likely to change permanently.

To help understand these geographic shifts, we have recently published the results of a research project. In this paper we show which neighbourhoods in the UK will be affected for better or worse and what it will mean for how the economy operates in future. In deference to the online meetings app that has become an ubiquitous part of remote office working, we decided to call these effects the zoomshock.

Zoomshock nation

We calculated the zoomshock as the change in economic activity due to working from home that has taken place within each UK neighbourhood. Simply put, this is the difference between two phenomena: the inflow of employment, which refers to people who live in a given neighbourhood and normally work elsewhere but are now working at home; and the outflow of employment, which is people who normally work in that neighbourhood but live elsewhere and are now working from home.

By our calculations, the potential reallocation of economic activity across different areas is large. The City of London, which is the heart of the UK financial services industry, could lose over 70% of its labour force if everyone who can work from home does so in the long term. This would equate to £9.1 billion in annual earnings. If the average worker only worked from home one day a week post-COVID, that would still account for £1.8 billion in lost activity, but it could well be that two or three days a week becomes the norm.

This economic activity will instead become less geographically concentrated, spread across different residential neighbourhoods. As an example, the local authority area of Lewisham in south-east London could see an increase in output of up to 60% relative to pre-COVID economic activity, or approximately £1 billion a year. You can see in the map below how we are forecasting this to play out across the capital, with shades of blue representing gains and shades of red representing losses.
The effect on Greater London
This has implications beyond the demand for slippers and umbrellas. Many of us who commuted spent money on services while at work, whether train-station coffees, lunchtime gym or barber visits, or after-work drinks. After the pandemic is over, we expect the zoomshock to continue to substantially affect these locally consumed services. So a move towards home working will mean that people demand more haircuts, coffees and restaurant meals near their homes and fewer near their offices.

There is already evidence of the importance of these effects. As you can see in the diagram below, in the brief period of relaxed lockdown measures from July to November 2020, London authorities such as the City that were negatively affected by remote working took a greater hit in retail and entertainment activity compared to 2019 levels than authorities like Lewisham that were positively affected. (It is worth emphasising that all areas were down compared to 2019 because the pandemic weakened economic activity across the board.)
The zoomshock and retail/entertainment activity
Winners and losers

This is not just a London phenomenon. In Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow and other UK cities, our research shows working from home has led to a shift away from city centres into the suburbs. Areas in which many commuters work, such as central Manchester, will lose out, while areas in which many commuters live, such as East Dunbartonshire on the northern outskirts of Glasgow, will win.
The effect in England and Wales The effect in Scotland
Clearly, the zoomshock is leading to a redistribution of activities from urban city centres to residential suburbs. But a second, more subtle, conclusion is that there is substantial variation across even adjacent neighbourhoods. This is driven by local geographic clustering in job type by neighbourhood and which jobs can be done at home.

As you can see from the next graph, which plots a neighbourhood's proportion of residents who can work at home against its score on the multiple index of deprivation, it is broadly the case that wealthier neighbourhoods have more potential remote workers. If working from home becomes the new normal, many restaurants, cafes, gyms and other locally consumed services will migrate away from city centres towards these neighbourhoods.
Remote working by neighbourhood deprivation
This is likely to make these wealthier neighbourhoods even more desirable places to live, giving them better amenities compared to more deprived neighbourhoods than they have already. In other words, the inequalities between different neighbourhoods are liable to become worse as a result of the zoomshock.

Implications for recovery

Many workers will probably return to the office once the COVID-19 crisis is over, but it is likely they will not want to be there as many days as before. If half of the workers in a city centre work from home only two days a week, that is a 20% decrease in potential demand for the surrounding local services.

The demand will not necessarily be lost, but just reallocated to the neighbourhoods where these workers live. Government policies to help the economy recover have to reflect this reality. Allocating scarce resources to support businesses in neighbourhoods experiencing a negative zoomshock may be in vain - businesses should be encouraged to follow the demand. This underscores the importance of monitoring how remote working develops once the public health crisis begins to subside.

To end on a positive, according to our model, more neighbourhoods win than lose from the zoomshock. This is because densely concentrated office work in urban centres is spread across a number of less dense residential neighbourhoods. In this way the zoomshock introduces challenges for how we use urban centres, but also opportunities for a new way to think about life in our suburbs.

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Five charts that reveal how remote working could change the UK

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City centres lying empty because so many people are working from home have received considerable media attention since the pandemic took hold. As the picture of a post-COVID world slowly comes into focus, it seems we are unlikely to return to the office in the same numbers as before.

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THE 5 SHAPES OF CORONA VIRUS ECONOMIC RECOVERY

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THE 5 SHAPES OF CORONA VIRUS ECONOMIC RECOVERY

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5 minute read

There has been lots of talk about what the shape of economic recovery might be. We expect a "swoosh-shape". Here's why.

An alphabet soup of recovery possibilities exists

Our current forecast calls for a staggering 10% decline (peak-to-trough) in global growth (GDP) in the first half of 2020. Given the weakness of the data for March and April, the results could prove far worse. However, the pace of contraction is less important than the timing and magnitude of the recovery that follows. An alphabet soup of possibilities exists. Below we share brief views on each of the possibilities.

What is a "V-shaped" economic recovery?

"V" - Historically, most recoveries have been V-shaped, with activity returning to pre-recession levels in the same or less time as the duration of the downturn. Unfortunately, the current experience is unlikely follow this pattern. While the sudden halt to activity associated with national lockdowns triggered a steep descent into recession, the re-opening of economies will occur much more gradually, precluding a sharp ascent during the recovery phase that characterises a V-shaped rebound.

If the shutdown of the global economy is similar to a light switch being flipped off, the re-start will be more like a dimmer switch being gradually turned up.

What is a "U-shaped" economic recovery?

"U" - The clearest example of a "U" was the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). Over the course of 2008 and 2009, the contraction in real GDP became gradually more pronounced, and the subsequent rebound to pre-GFC levels in many countries took years.

As noted, the economic contraction triggered by the coronavirus has been sudden and sharp. This steep slope on the downside reduces the possibility of the current episode looking like a "U." Similarly, on the upside, even a staggered re-opening will statistically generate a steeper ascent (off an extremely low base) than would be characteristic of a "U".

What is a "W-shaped" economic recovery?

"W" - The so-called "double-dip". Under this scenario, the economy contracts, recovers, and then falls back into recession - in this case, presumably due to a resurgence of the virus. While we certainly do not dispute the possibility, even probability, of renewed outbreak later this year, our assumption is that a "second wave" would be more manageable.

In addition to perhaps more widespread immunity, governments should be far better prepared. With expansive testing, better treatment, more medical supplies and hospital beds - this preparedness should hopefully eliminate the need for blanket restrictions to be reinstated. While we believe a "W" can be avoided, uncertainty surrounding coronavirus leaves us most concerned about the risk of this scenario.

What is an "L-shaped" economic recovery?

"L" - This pattern is the most pessimistic, and thankfully the most unlikely, in our view. Under this scenario, the level of activity drops almost vertically and then essentially flat lines over the course of several years. To be sure, the shuttering of global economies may deliver the initial down stroke. However, the sheer magnitude of the initial plunge (not to mention the unprecedented monetary and fiscal policy response) dramatically increases the probability that at least some pickup in activity will be seen this year. Moreover, the widespread closure of national economies cannot be sustained indefinitely; the economic cost and the social backlash would be too great.

A "tipping point" exists where the challenge for business shifts from short-term liquidity to long-term solvency and whether companies can survive in the face of curtailed activity. That window may be one to three months, after which either some rebound is seen or real GDP falls further. In other words, over the second half of 2020, the economy will almost surely be either growing or continuing to contract; it won't be holding steady at low levels as depicted by an "L".

What is a "swoosh/tick/italicised V-shaped" economic recovery? Our base case

"Italicised V" - That's what we're calling it, though. It's also known as the "swoosh". This is our base case - a steeper gradient on the downside, then a partial bounce, followed by a more gradual recovery. While the old adage "the larger the fall, the higher the bounce" is tempting to consider, the second-half rebound is unlikely to recoup all of the losses generated in the first half of 2020 (H1).

As you can see in the charts below, we expect all regions to see a "swoosh-shaped" rebound, with the US, Euro Area, UK and Japan's recovery occurring simultaneously, though at different levels. China's swoosh, due to their timing of the coronavirus, will occur slightly earlier.

A "swoosh-shaped" recovery is our base case

Why our base case calls for a "swoosh-shaped" recovery

We believe several factors will hinder the pace of recovery. On the consumer front, the economic damage that the virus has wrought - particularly with respect to employment and earnings - will have lingering effect. Even beyond the income hole created by temporary or permanent job losses, consumer behaviour will be changed. In our view, the re-opening of economies will not mean a quick return to "normal" - social distancing practices, ongoing concern over health, and the desire for greater precautionary savings will partially offset the release of pent-up demand.

On the business side, increased uncertainty over the outlook, post-crisis overcapacity (particularly in hard-hit sectors, e.g. airlines, hotels, energy), and high debt levels will restrain the rebound in capital spending. While output will surely bounce as the lockdowns are lifted, the case for a strong and sustained consumer- or business-led recovery is limited. In the UK, US, Euro area, and Japan, we expect large increases in real GDP in Q3 and Q4 (recouping a good portion of the output lost in H1) to give way to progressively smaller gains through 2021 - resulting in an "italicised V" or "swoosh-shaped" recovery (in China, the return to pre-virus levels is seen earlier).

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The 5 shapes of coronavirus economic recovery and why our base case is a "swoosh" - NatWest Corporates and Institutions

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5 minute read An alphabet soup of recovery possibilities exists Our current forecast calls for a staggering 10% decline (peak-to-trough) in global growth (GDP) in the first half of 2020. Given the weakness of the data for March and April, the results could prove far worse.