Adapting to lockdown

By mid-April 2020, a third of the global population was under full or partial lockdown. While ‘lockdown’ was not a technical term used by public-health officials, it referred to anything from mandatory geographic quarantines to non- mandatory recommendations to stay at home, closures of certain types of businesses, or bans on events and gatherings. During this lockdown period, the travel sector worldwide continued to experience a loss of business. For example, Spain’s famous annual San Fermin bull-running festival, which usually draws thousands of participants, was canceled because of the coronavirus crisis. “As expected as it was, it still leaves us deeply sad,” said acting mayor Ana Elizalde in a statement from the local Pamplona town hall. The July festival, which was made famous in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, has seldom been canceled in its history. Other major European tourist events were canceled, including Oktoberfest, the famous annual German beer-drinking festival which traditionally sees six million people travel to Munich.

The future of travel

Most experts would agree that recovery from the COVID-19 crisis will be slow (see Figure 6.2), in large part due to the impact that the crisis has had on the global travel and tourism industry (Romei, 2020). Until there is vaccine, the virus will influence nearly every sector of travel from transportation, destination and resorts, to the accommodations, attractions, events and restaurants. The first section of this chapter looks at the future for these different sectors, a future heavily influenced by technology and a heightened emphasis on health and safety. The second part of the chapter focuses on a theme that has been prevalent in this book – the need for adaptability or ‘COVID-aptability’. Consumer demands and behavior will be permanently altered by the pandemic, and all stakeholders in the travel industry will need to adapt. One part of adaptability is redesigning servicescapes – a necessity for many after the lockdown, and this is the subject of the penultimate section of the chapter. The conclusion looks at lessons learned from this crisis.

An unfolding crisis

The travel industry worldwide has been dealt a vicious blow. It is forecast that the number of international tourist arrivals will fall by 60-80%% in 2020 due to the novel coronavirus, putting millions of jobs at risk (Alpert & Beilfuss, 2020; UNTWO, 2020). The drop in arrivals will lead to an estimated loss of $300-450 billion in international tourism receipts (The Economic Times, 2020). The industry will recover, but travel will never be the same again, and the year 2020 will be a defining moment in the history of the tourism sector. But how did this crisis unfold and start to impact travel? This chapter will track the period between the first signs of the virus at the end of 2019 to the beginning of April 2020, showing how as the virus spread, so too did its impact on the travel and tourism around the world.

Crisis communication

An advertising campaign from Marketing Greece during the COVID-19 pandemic urged international travelers to “#staysafe” during the difficult times, while images of the idyllic Greek Islands allowed viewers to continue to dream and plan an escape to the stunningly beautiful country of Greece. Clever, one might think, sharing the message with the international tourist that better days are surely coming, while urging them to stay safe in the meantime. Yet some suggested that promoting tourism during the pandemic was borderline irresponsible (Spinks, 2020). In fact, quite a few destinations even campaigned against tourism – Visit Wales, for example, urged travelers to stay away. How should the travel industry have responded to this crisis? What was the correct tone of message? And what would persuade travelers to venture out of their homes once the coast was clear? This chapter will explore such issues, in addition to examining internal communications strategies employed by the industry during the pandemic.

The economic, social and environmental impacts of COVID 19

As mentioned in Chapter 1, the tourism and hospitality sector was particularly vulnerable to the COVID-19 crisis, especially in destinations like Aruba that were so dependent on tourism. This vulnerability has already been highlighted throughout the book, but Chapter 5 will look in more detail at the economic, social and environmental impacts of COVID-19. Most of the studies to date about the consequences of the pandemic have emphasized the economic impacts, so a synopsis of those studies will be provided. However, there have been significant social and environmental impacts from the crisis that have affected the travel sector, so these are also discussed in this chapter.