Vaccine passports, domestic tourism, pricey flights - is this future of travel in post-pandemic Asia [View all]

[Klaralven]

When international travel returns, it’s likely tourists will have to use a second passport – a globally recognised one that shows all the vaccines they have taken. Even with the new documentation, however, the free movement of people that happened in pre-pandemic times is unlikely to return this year, with travellers mostly limited to travel bubbles or business lanes. And with fewer flights and more vaccines and tests, hopping aboard a plane is likely to become a lot more expensive – and a lot less frequent.

Those were the predictions of tourism experts who spoke to This Week in Asia – with the additional point that just like last year, travellers are more likely to stick to exploring their own countries rather than heading overseas.

Hotelier Ho Kwon Ping – the executive chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, which runs hotels across Asia, America, Africa and the Middle East – told a recent conference that travel would become more purposeful, with people thinking harder before buying a flight ticket, whether for leisure or business. Meanwhile, Abhineet Kaul, senior director of public sector and government at Frost & Sullivan, said it would be “at least 2024 before tourism is back to the levels of 2018 and 2019”.

Travel has changed drastically since January last year, when countries around the world began to ban flights from China in reaction to the spread of the coronavirus there. As the restrictions spread in the wake of Covid-19, international travel ground to a standstill. Little has changed almost 12 months later, with many countries now banning arrivals from Britain and South Africa due to a more infectious variant of the disease.

https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3116142/vaccine-passports-domestic-tourism-pricey-flights-future-travel