Skift Take
For the travel industry, coronavirus has upended everything, kind of like how we expected climate change to — just much faster. Recovery, when it comes, will require taking the lessons from this thoroughly global disruption on board.
The travel industry has always been an optimistic one, underpinned by the belief that the world is small and international borders are but a minor inconvenience. If you can be on a flight to Mauritius in three hours, booked via an app on your phone, with frequent flyer miles your business travel earned you, why on earth would you stay home?
But for the past decade or so, it’s also been something of a sitting duck. Climate change has been coming, we’ve known that. But despite the talk of carbon offsets and tremendous plastic reduction PR, the travel industry has always been reluctant to admit that the very premise that it is based on — frictionless, consequence-free movement — is very likely at odds with the future that’s coming for all of us.
That’s a future when the world feels smaller, when extreme weather events impact our lives more often, when the resilience of our communities will start to feel
