As our team make their first overseas forays via two weeks of enforced rest in foreign hotels, we speculate on the future of travel.

• In the short term, and to a longer horizon for budget travellers, domestic travel will dominate. Those of us suffering in city-states will benefit from travel bubbles with similarly isolated counterparts.

• Road trips within 3 hours of land-locked cities will increase in popularity, driven by avoidance of exposure on mass transport and by the depletion of leave balances by covid disruption.

• Corporate travel may never return to its previous level and will involve fewer but more lengthy trips, perhaps linked to international conferences or appended to a personal vacation. Hotel brand positioning will loosen accordingly.

• Some hotels will pivot permanently to quarantine-like conditions making social distance a virtue, a reprieve from hectic modern life. Privacy will be equated with safety and security. Circulation and contact points will be reconsidered.

• Staycations will remain an essential diversification for city hotels. Now that we can work from anywhere, a break from the spare bedroom becomes increasingly attractive. All-in offers with spa, bar and dining will keep guests in the hotel (in a true domestic travel bubble).

• Resorts will be broadly divided into luxury accommodation catering to wealthy global travellers seeking intensely local experiences and mass-market offerings dominated by domestic tourists. These properties will differentiate themselves by ‘purpose’ (family-friendly, business retreat, sports resort).

• Self-contained, all-inclusive resorts close to regional airports will be positioned as ‘fly-in/fly-out’ safe haven retreats, as evident in the Maldives, where each island has effectively become a luxury ‘quarantine station’.

• Lock-down induced air quality improvements, revitalisation of ecologies and slowing of the pace of life will reinforce the desire for balanced lifestyles. Travellers will favour less frenetic, more local trips with nature-engaging activities.

Covid has coalesced a movement that was already evident; a sustainability-driven shift from frantic, low-quality tripping towards a slower and more contemplative mode. The most significant challenge will be to community building – engaging guests with each other and with the people of the places they are visiting.

References:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/05/06/travel/coronavirus-travel-questions.html

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/nov/03/private-jet-bookings-soar-as-wealthy-flee-second-england-lockdown

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/The-Big-Story/Travel-bug-Why-tourism-in-Asia-will-never-be-the-same

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/rearvision/mass-tourism-how-everyone-became-a-traveller/12782368