New Travel Norms After Covid-19 Pandemic

Sadly but truly, Covid-19 pandemic has struck the global tourism entirely since last year. To fight or curb the spread of the highly contagious virus, all countries had inevitably adopted isolation strategies. These include strict borders crossing measures with mandatory quarantine, if not shutting down the borders entirely. Consequently, this had halted the global travels, for both businesses or tourisms.

But the worst has gratefully passed. With vaccinations successfully restrained the worsening of the pandemic, we are seeing recovery of most travel activities in many of the countries, albeit with some possibly permanent adaptation to the new normal. We think travelers from the whole world should learn now what would be the new travel norms after the Covid-19 pandemic.

New Protocols For Healthier Environment

Like it or not, healthy and hygienic measures include frequent cleaning, sanitizing, personal protective equipment such as masks, thermal screening and infrared scanners to visitors, control of crowds in queuing until the contactless measures, will all shape the new protocols being adapted by all sector players in the industry. For travelers, we should be well aware of these new travel norms. These new normal shall last for at least some times from now, if not permanently.

New Travel Styles

There would be a rising demand in domestic and short-haul touring. Holiday packages for private groups with rental cars and hotels are more popular than less intimate forms of transportation, such as group tours.

Trip.com Group recently conducted research with Google which showed that customers are booking on much shorter lead-times than previously. 80% of bookings in the new world are within a fortnight of departure, as opposed to 36 days before departure in pre-Covid-19 times.

New Travel Destinations

Travelers are now wary in selecting tour groups and accommodations. They are looking for new destinations in less crowded areas include nature tourism to replace those more crowded places and activities.

One of the upcoming destinations I reckon in this after-pandemic recovery period is wine tours. More travelers are interested in joining private wine tours to those enticing wineries in wine making cities of countries with famous and long wine history. If people used to flock into crowded places like Eiffel Tower or Louvre museum in Paris, more tourists, including myself, will feel safer to join the wine trip to Bordeaux or Champagne!

Switch In Popularity Chart

Besides, different countries have different protocols in welcoming foreign tourists. Some are on the path to reopening to fully vaccinated visitors, but others are still hesitate in relaxing the entries. For instance, starting 19th October 2021, Singapore has opened vaccinated traveler lanes (VTL) to 11 countries. South Korea will open a travel lane with Singapore on 15th November. Whereas the United States will remove travel restrictions on countries in the Schengen Area, Brazil, China, Iran, Ireland, and United Kingdom for fully vaccinated travelers. Restrictions on land borders between the U.S., Canada, and Mexico are also being lifted in early November! After slowly starting to open up to vaccinated travelers in July, Thailand is announcing moves to open to fully vaccinated travelers from more countries in the next two months!

With these different pace in allowing inbound tourism, some countries will have the lead in attracting new visitors while other popular travel destinations such as New Zealand could lose their faith eventually.

Will These New Travel Norms Be Permanent?

No one will deny the fact that the damage COVID-19 pandemic caused to the world had been immense. The loss of human lives and wealth has been humongous, if not unprecedented. Nonetheless, we learnt something from it. We learnt the importance of hygiene and environmental impact on our precious lives. We learnt the importance of wearing masks in public and washing hands with hand sanitizers. These changes could last for a long time, if not permanent.

We all love to travel. So shutting down borders for foreign tourists is definitely the last thing we wish to keep. If those new travel norms could prevent any future pandemic, what’s the harm of it being permanent? Let’s resume travel! Happy Holidays! – Travel Feeder