Name: Covid-19: why travel will never be the same | The Economist
Uploaded: 2020-07-13T23:56:59.000Z
Duration: 7 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

This is what the skies looked like in March

When passenger numbers were a staggering...

But travel is becoming increasingly localised and complicated

This world of quite easy travel and relatively free movement...

This will have consequences far beyond cancelled holiday bookings

It could exacerbate existing inequalities...

...and disrupt the workings of the globalised world

Every year, international holiday-makers spend $1.6trn

Or at least they did, before the coronavirus pandemic

Postpone or cancel all non-essential travel

In April 2020 planes carried just 31m passengers around the world

The sort of passenger levels last seen in the late 1970s

In April this year, 200,000 passengers...

...went through Heathrow Airport in London...

...which is fewer than would go through on any single day in a normal month

...has said flights will not return to pre-pandemic levels for several years

In China, flights are now just 21% below normal levels...

...while in America, air traffic began to pick up in May...

And in much of Europe, flight numbers are still around 75% lower...

And while passenger numbers are creeping up...

...some areas, like business travel, may never recover

After the last financial crisis the number of overseas business trips...

...taken per person in the UK fell by a third and never picked up

Whereas leisure travel did, eventually, climb back to pre-crisis levels

...it could have a significant impact on airline profits

Business travellers actually subsidise leisure travellers

Your £250 transatlantic fare in the back of the plane...

...is possible because somebody at the front of the plane...

Virgin Atlantic has annouced plans to cut more than 3,000 jobs in the UK

Air Canada lost more than $1bn in the first quarter

In March IATA warned that without government aid...

...just 30 of the world's 700 or so airlines would make it through the pandemic

...will determine the competition and prices on certain routes

Some airlines are in pretty good financial shape

Within Europe there remains a lot of competition

Transatlantic flights, there is still plenty of competition

But on routes where there is much thinner competition, prices will go up

For the well-off, the price increases may be an annoyance

But they could also have a significant impact on global mobility

As lower-income travellers may find themselves priced out of the skies

What happens with airfares and with the prices of flights...

Migrants have parents or spouses in one country and work in another

And for all of these people, it is quite important that...

In June, 189 countries had imposed some form of travel restriction

Ranging from measures like quarantine, to border closures

And governments are desperate to open up travel as quickly as possible

The government is to make it easier for British holiday-makers...

...to travel to much of Europe this summer

Though these arrangements may help tourists...

...they could also create an increasingly inequitable system

The British government is working to allow Brits to go off on holiday...

...to, say, Spain or France and come back without the need for quarantine

But that doesn't take into account the fact that...

...someone may have a partner in America...

...parents in Nigeria or siblings in Pakistan

And they won't be able to go see people who are very, very important to them

The risk is that we end up with a very uneven and possibly unfair system

The relatively free movement enjoyed by many tourists...

...that has played an increasingly important role in globalisation...

For around 30 years until the end of the 1970s...

...travel to and from China was heavily restricted

But today China sends more tourists abroad than any other country

In 2018 Chinese tourists spent over $270bn overseas

And the limitations on travel caused by the pandemic...

...could have a knock-on effect on global co-operation and economic growth

The worry is that these restrictions persist in the long-term...

...and then become entangled in all sorts of other things...

...such as reciprocity, trade negotiations...

...any sort of geopolitical dispute between countries

And so we return to a sort of mid-20th century world...

...of closed borders, lots of restrictions and paperwork...

...and just less interchange between countries

Faced with an ever-changing array of travel restrictions...

...many travellers are looking closer to home for their holidays

In May, 80% of total reservations on Airbnb were made domestically