Dear World Travel Groups, Stop the Mind-Boggling Confusion Over Testing and Vaccines Now
Photo Credit: Leading travel organizations' statements on vaccine mandates are confusing and potentially harmful to the industry's faster recovery. Getty Images / Manjurul
Skift Take
Nearly a year since Covid's start, the lack of a united front among travel and tourism's leading organizations and groups continues — this time, with confounding, divergent opinions on vaccine mandates. This fragmented approach is sure to stunt the industry's pace of recovery.
After 10 months of Covid lows that led to over 170 million jobs lost in tourism yet culminated at last in two vaccine announcements, it seemed as if the travel industry’s major travel organizations would finally unite on a standardized approach to travel protocols, while the world awaits global vaccine access and distribution.
Instead, the new year is already fraught with their unilateral statements on vaccine requirements to travel, as well as ongoing diverging opinions on testing protocols, quarantines and country bans. This deep lack of a unified policy is staggering — and stifling the restart of travel unnecessarily.
As AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes said at the start of 2021, "[t]he coordination on Covid is horrific.”
A Fragmented Industry
The dissonance across the travel industry was clear early on when the World Health Organization advised that shutting borders to travelers was not an effective measure in controlling the pandemic’s spread and encouraged screening ins
