The World Has Abandoned the Travel Industry
In the early days of the Covid era, I was as oblivious to the epidemiology of the novel coronavirus as any other layperson. But I saw the economic storm coming over the horizon while many of you were still basking in the sun.
Traffic to the family of travel blogs I operate, which focus disproportionately on countries in Asia, began decreasing precipitously in the days after the virus escaped China in late January. While most Americans (and even the residents of Iran and Italy) went about their Februarys in blissful oblivion, the wheels were falling off my bus.
But I kept calm and carried on. Public health authorities around the world, after all, were minimizing the possibility that the new disease would become a pandemic. In spite of dramatically lower website visitor numbers (and ad revenue), a fair number of my readers were still commissioning custom itineraries for countries like Japan, albeit for the distant autumn instead of the impending cherry blossom season.
Moreover, I had spent all of 2019 anticipating a recession in 2020, and accumulating substantial cash reserves to prepare for it. (All the 2010s, really — I first launched my business in the aftermath of the Great Recession, so you might say I’ve always been waiting for the other shoe to drop.)
By the time you get back to Taipei, I silently reassured myself as I climbed into a taxi bound for Taoyuan Airport during the first hours of the first day of March, things will be on their way back to normal.
I began to worry, within seconds of my having cleared immigration, that things were much farther away from “normal” than I could’ve imagined. The few travelers walking through the once-bustling hub seemed scared and skittish, those whose expressions weren’t hidden behind face masks or full hazmat suits, anyway. Only a handful of people were waiting to board the Airbus A330 that I hoped would still be taking all of us to Bangkok, where I’d be completing what turned out to be my last major paid project to date.
Yet business ended up being mostly as usual on the ground in Thailand, which in spite of never having banned travelers from China, had no discernible epidemic. I had to fill out some paperwork upon re-entering Taiwan nine days later, but avoided the quarantine awaiting those inbound from so-called “Level 3” countries, such as South Korea and Japan.
When I emerged from a taxi in the same place I’d climbed into a different one just over a week earlier, I was less certain of when normality would make its return, but convinced nonetheless that it was nigh.
I did my best to keep my head buried in the sand the second and third weeks of March, in spite of the increasingly bad news seeping in from Europe, and the mounting anxiety (and, then, panic) of my friends and family in the United States.
But that Tuesday afternoon—the third one, this is—as I sat inside Starbucks after lunch at my favorite duck rice restaurant, a pronouncement so piercing I could’ve heard it from the center of the earth summoned me back up to the surface. “All foreign nationals to be barred from entering Taiwan as of Thursday,” the notification on my phone read, “with indefinite effect.”
Although a pit as deep as Sun Moon Lake formed in my stomach, my instinct was to feel relieved. I was in Taiwan already, and the article made no mention of expelling foreigners who remained after the ban.
The problem, of course, was that if I departed 10 days later on my annual sakura sojourn to Japan (which wasn’t banning foreigners, at least not US passport holders traveling from Taiwan, at least not yet), there was a chance I would be unable to return.
I won’t go into the gory details of how slowly the next week-and-a-half passed, or guide you through the logical maze that led me to cancel my trip, which had seemed inconceivable as recently as my fifth sip of cold brew that third Tuesday in March. But in those 240 hours, which felt like 240 years, my entire world disintegrated.
And then it vaporized. By the time the calendar page flipped again, Taiwan’s (and Japan’s) borders weren’t the only ones closed. President Trump had banned Europeans (but not Brits, at least not initially) from entering the US; Europe banned Americans in kind. Shortly thereafter (or maybe before) the US-Canada border slammed shut, though I don’t remember now who fired the first shot in that war. Australia and New Zealand, where I’d just been in January and February, walled themselves off too. And so did most of the other 90+ countries that had happily welcomed me over the preceding decade.
Still, I tried to keep everything in perspective. While it was shocking — horrifying, really — how quickly our global civilization had reverted to a medieval one, the fear that guided the decisions of world leaders was understandable. No one wanted to see their city become the next Tehran or Bergamo (or, as infections and deaths mounted there, New York), even as studies continued to show that travel bans do little to mitigate the spread of pandemics.
Unfolding healthcare tragedies notwithstanding, people poorer and far less privileged than me were losing their jobs. Even in the best of times, a certain percentage of the population saw the travel industry as frivolous and wasteful. I didn’t dare air grievances now, when many were public about the contempt with which they looked upon my profession.
Throughout April and now May, I’ve counted my blessings and bitten my tongue, and have largely kept my teeth clenched.
I’ve written a dozen new articles every week — I created two brand-new niche sites! — in spite of the fact that travel searches have remained near zero, and almost every country in the world has continued banning international arrivals.
I’ve taken advantage of Taiwan’s masterful elimination of the virus, embarking on domestic trips every other weekend, and trying to suppress how sad I feel about not being able to venture off the island.
I’ve remained logged out of my personal Facebook account, to avoid interjecting myself into the debates that raged about re-opening, lest a well-meaning everyman accuse a “non-essential” worker like me of putting concerns about my livelihood above the lives of front-line medical heroes.
More than anything, I’ve done my best to stay optimistic and patient, believing that the storm I saw on the horizon before almost anybody else did would pass as quickly as it had appeared.
But as curves have flattened, and economies around the world have restarted, people (and especially governments) have not been as compassionate toward me and my industry as we were toward society as a whole.
Elected leaders (and, more infuriatingly, un-elected bureaucrats) have largely refused to set a timetable for the re-opening of borders, or even publicize the benchmarks they will use to chart a course of action. “Dream now, travel later,” they say, as if we can all just twiddle our thumbs until some as yet unspecified date in 2021 or even 2022.
The interpersonal implications have been even more discouraging. Well-meaning friends and strangers alike attempt to dismiss my despair with unsolicited reassurances of the most half-hearted sort.
“Can’t you just focus on domestic travel for a while?” they’ll ask, oblivious not only to how long it takes to establish authority about a destination, but about how monumentally more difficult it is to restart one’s business — to resuscitate a multi-trillion dollar industry that’s been in an induced coma for half a year — than it is to fill out a job application. (Which, frankly, is all that 99% of traditionally employed people are going to need to do to get their lives back.)
Some of my more clueless colleagues have suggested we all peddle nonsense “virtual tours,” or that start columns about “traveling through food,” as if a spoonful of green curry cooked by a white person is going to comfort anyone whose Thailand travel dreams are now on the back burner, maybe forever.
Others, of course, are downright hostile. Environmentalist lunatics want all airplanes to stay grounded forever so that we can revert to lives of subsistence farming and save the planet.
Embittered denizens of desirable locales herald the death of “overtourism” as they reclaim their cities and countries in victory, at peace with the millions of dollars their economies are now guaranteed to lose.
Hypochondriacs remain convinced this moderately-deadly disease is the second coming of the Bubonic Plague or the Spanish Flu. They believe (again, contrary to the science) that travelers are super-spreading disease vectors, and that we are selfish at best (and, at worst, grandma-killers) for wanting to trot around the globe again.
At this point, my tongue is bleeding — I’m not going to bite it anymore. Instead, I’m going to speak a truth I haven’t heard from anyone else: Travel professionals are essential workers.
We can start with raw numbers, i.e. the fact that tourism employs one in 10 workers around the globe, or that the travel industry contributed nearly $9 trillion to the world’s GDP in 2019 alone. But we don’t need to end there.
The fact is that once you’re done feeling afraid (which will happen long before the development and deployment of a vaccine that may never materialize), the pilots and flight attendants whose airlines you insisted did not deserve bailouts will be tasked with flying you across the country and around the world.
Hotel receptionists and restaurant servers who went months without working (and, in some parts of the world, without pay) while you waxed poetic about the rise of the staycation will happily greet you, although you won’t be able to see them smiling through their masks.
Bloggers like me will continue publishing in-depth — and largely free — articles that allow you to wander confidently through cities and regions you didn’t previously know existed, armed with the knowledge we’ve spent years of our lives and thousands of dollars amassing.
Respect us, and respect these facts. This is my message to the people of the world.
To the governments of the world, I urge you: Commit to a date for opening your borders now. Don’t patronize us with nonsense word salad like “when it’s safe,” or suggest that our livelihoods — our lives — must remain on hold until the virus has been eradicated, which even the World Health Organization now admits is unlikely to happen.
The world abandoned the travel industry, and we were willing to be cast aside (or at least we understood why you did it) initially, and even for weeks (now months) afterwards. We bit our tongues. We counted our blessings.
But as countries democratic and authoritarian, left and right, small and large begin re-opening their economies, they must wake from the neo-nationalistic slumber they’ve been in since the dawn of the Covid era. For better or for worse, we all live in a world that is and will continue to be connected, a world where free movement is something approaching a human right.
The world needs to honor those of us who engineered and built these connections, and support us as we revamp and upgrade them. Let’s emerge from hiding not as individuals, cities and countries, but as a planet and a species.
