581 Days Later, It’s Time to Travel
Skift Take
The travel industry's pandemic interregnum period is over. We have gained so much in what we lost.
581 days ago, I wrote this essay on how March 14, 2020 will forever be remembered in history books as the day the world stopped traveling.
Now, 581 days later, as the United States last Friday announced November 8 as the date when anyone in the vaccinated world is welcome to come through our borders, it is safe to say the travel industry’s pandemic interregnum period is over. As countries and tourist destinations across the board open up — even the fortress Australia is starting the reopening process and sclerotic Singapore is finally giving in and opening up with its typically on-brand bureaucratic “vaccinated travel lanes” — the vaccinated world is ready and able to travel again in the coming weeks and months.
The long global nightmare of a grounded planet is now going to be confined to introspections and dissections for years to come, but not as a continuing reality. The travel industry’s existential times, at least for th
