future of tourism after covid 19

The future of tourism: Bridging the labor gap, enhancing customer experience

As travel resumes and builds momentum, it’s becoming clear that tourism is resilient—there is an enduring desire to travel. Against all odds, international tourism rebounded in 2022: visitor numbers to Europe and the Middle East climbed to around 80 percent of 2019 levels, and the Americas recovered about 65 percent of prepandemic visitors 1 “Tourism set to return to pre-pandemic levels in some regions in 2023,” United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), January 17, 2023. —a number made more significant because it was reached without travelers from China, which had the world’s largest outbound travel market before the pandemic. 2 “ Outlook for China tourism 2023: Light at the end of the tunnel ,” McKinsey, May 9, 2023.

Recovery and growth are likely to continue. According to estimates from the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) for 2023, international tourist arrivals could reach 80 to 95 percent of prepandemic levels depending on the extent of the economic slowdown, travel recovery in Asia–Pacific, and geopolitical tensions, among other factors. 3 “Tourism set to return to pre-pandemic levels in some regions in 2023,” United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), January 17, 2023. Similarly, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) forecasts that by the end of 2023, nearly half of the 185 countries in which the organization conducts research will have either recovered to prepandemic levels or be within 95 percent of full recovery. 4 “Global travel and tourism catapults into 2023 says WTTC,” World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), April 26, 2023.

Longer-term forecasts also point to optimism for the decade ahead. Travel and tourism GDP is predicted to grow, on average, at 5.8 percent a year between 2022 and 2032, outpacing the growth of the overall economy at an expected 2.7 percent a year. 5 Travel & Tourism economic impact 2022 , WTTC, August 2022.

So, is it all systems go for travel and tourism? Not really. The industry continues to face a prolonged and widespread labor shortage. After losing 62 million travel and tourism jobs in 2020, labor supply and demand remain out of balance. 6 “WTTC research reveals Travel & Tourism’s slow recovery is hitting jobs and growth worldwide,” World Travel & Tourism Council, October 6, 2021. Today, in the European Union, 11 percent of tourism jobs are likely to go unfilled; in the United States, that figure is 7 percent. 7 Travel & Tourism economic impact 2022 : Staff shortages, WTTC, August 2022.

There has been an exodus of tourism staff, particularly from customer-facing roles, to other sectors, and there is no sign that the industry will be able to bring all these people back. 8 Travel & Tourism economic impact 2022 : Staff shortages, WTTC, August 2022. Hotels, restaurants, cruises, airports, and airlines face staff shortages that can translate into operational, reputational, and financial difficulties. If unaddressed, these shortages may constrain the industry’s growth trajectory.

The current labor shortage may have its roots in factors related to the nature of work in the industry. Chronic workplace challenges, coupled with the effects of COVID-19, have culminated in an industry struggling to rebuild its workforce. Generally, tourism-related jobs are largely informal, partly due to high seasonality and weak regulation. And conditions such as excessively long working hours, low wages, a high turnover rate, and a lack of social protection tend to be most pronounced in an informal economy. Additionally, shift work, night work, and temporary or part-time employment are common in tourism.

The industry may need to revisit some fundamentals to build a far more sustainable future: either make the industry more attractive to talent (and put conditions in place to retain staff for longer periods) or improve products, services, and processes so that they complement existing staffing needs or solve existing pain points.

One solution could be to build a workforce with the mix of digital and interpersonal skills needed to keep up with travelers’ fast-changing requirements. The industry could make the most of available technology to provide customers with a digitally enhanced experience, resolve staff shortages, and improve working conditions.

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Complementing concierges with chatbots.

The pace of technological change has redefined customer expectations. Technology-driven services are often at customers’ fingertips, with no queues or waiting times. By contrast, the airport and airline disruption widely reported in the press over the summer of 2022 points to customers not receiving this same level of digital innovation when traveling.

Imagine the following travel experience: it’s 2035 and you start your long-awaited honeymoon to a tropical island. A virtual tour operator and a destination travel specialist booked your trip for you; you connected via videoconference to make your plans. Your itinerary was chosen with the support of generative AI , which analyzed your preferences, recommended personalized travel packages, and made real-time adjustments based on your feedback.

Before leaving home, you check in online and QR code your luggage. You travel to the airport by self-driving cab. After dropping off your luggage at the self-service counter, you pass through security and the biometric check. You access the premier lounge with the QR code on the airline’s loyalty card and help yourself to a glass of wine and a sandwich. After your flight, a prebooked, self-driving cab takes you to the resort. No need to check in—that was completed online ahead of time (including picking your room and making sure that the hotel’s virtual concierge arranged for red roses and a bottle of champagne to be delivered).

While your luggage is brought to the room by a baggage robot, your personal digital concierge presents the honeymoon itinerary with all the requested bookings. For the romantic dinner on the first night, you order your food via the restaurant app on the table and settle the bill likewise. So far, you’ve had very little human interaction. But at dinner, the sommelier chats with you in person about the wine. The next day, your sightseeing is made easier by the hotel app and digital guide—and you don’t get lost! With the aid of holographic technology, the virtual tour guide brings historical figures to life and takes your sightseeing experience to a whole new level. Then, as arranged, a local citizen meets you and takes you to their home to enjoy a local family dinner. The trip is seamless, there are no holdups or snags.

This scenario features less human interaction than a traditional trip—but it flows smoothly due to the underlying technology. The human interactions that do take place are authentic, meaningful, and add a special touch to the experience. This may be a far-fetched example, but the essence of the scenario is clear: use technology to ease typical travel pain points such as queues, misunderstandings, or misinformation, and elevate the quality of human interaction.

Travel with less human interaction may be considered a disruptive idea, as many travelers rely on and enjoy the human connection, the “service with a smile.” This will always be the case, but perhaps the time is right to think about bringing a digital experience into the mix. The industry may not need to depend exclusively on human beings to serve its customers. Perhaps the future of travel is physical, but digitally enhanced (and with a smile!).

Digital solutions are on the rise and can help bridge the labor gap

Digital innovation is improving customer experience across multiple industries. Car-sharing apps have overcome service-counter waiting times and endless paperwork that travelers traditionally had to cope with when renting a car. The same applies to time-consuming hotel check-in, check-out, and payment processes that can annoy weary customers. These pain points can be removed. For instance, in China, the Huazhu Hotels Group installed self-check-in kiosks that enable guests to check in or out in under 30 seconds. 9 “Huazhu Group targets lifestyle market opportunities,” ChinaTravelNews, May 27, 2021.

Technology meets hospitality

In 2019, Alibaba opened its FlyZoo Hotel in Huangzhou, described as a “290-room ultra-modern boutique, where technology meets hospitality.” 1 “Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has a hotel run almost entirely by robots that can serve food and fetch toiletries—take a look inside,” Business Insider, October 21, 2019; “FlyZoo Hotel: The hotel of the future or just more technology hype?,” Hotel Technology News, March 2019. The hotel was the first of its kind that instead of relying on traditional check-in and key card processes, allowed guests to manage reservations and make payments entirely from a mobile app, to check-in using self-service kiosks, and enter their rooms using facial-recognition technology.

The hotel is run almost entirely by robots that serve food and fetch toiletries and other sundries as needed. Each guest room has a voice-activated smart assistant to help guests with a variety of tasks, from adjusting the temperature, lights, curtains, and the TV to playing music and answering simple questions about the hotel and surroundings.

The hotel was developed by the company’s online travel platform, Fliggy, in tandem with Alibaba’s AI Labs and Alibaba Cloud technology with the goal of “leveraging cutting-edge tech to help transform the hospitality industry, one that keeps the sector current with the digital era we’re living in,” according to the company.

Adoption of some digitally enhanced services was accelerated during the pandemic in the quest for safer, contactless solutions. During the Winter Olympics in Beijing, a restaurant designed to keep physical contact to a minimum used a track system on the ceiling to deliver meals directly from the kitchen to the table. 10 “This Beijing Winter Games restaurant uses ceiling-based tracks,” Trendhunter, January 26, 2022. Customers around the world have become familiar with restaurants using apps to display menus, take orders, and accept payment, as well as hotels using robots to deliver luggage and room service (see sidebar “Technology meets hospitality”). Similarly, theme parks, cinemas, stadiums, and concert halls are deploying digital solutions such as facial recognition to optimize entrance control. Shanghai Disneyland, for example, offers annual pass holders the option to choose facial recognition to facilitate park entry. 11 “Facial recognition park entry,” Shanghai Disney Resort website.

Automation and digitization can also free up staff from attending to repetitive functions that could be handled more efficiently via an app and instead reserve the human touch for roles where staff can add the most value. For instance, technology can help customer-facing staff to provide a more personalized service. By accessing data analytics, frontline staff can have guests’ details and preferences at their fingertips. A trainee can become an experienced concierge in a short time, with the help of technology.

Apps and in-room tech: Unused market potential

According to Skift Research calculations, total revenue generated by guest apps and in-room technology in 2019 was approximately $293 million, including proprietary apps by hotel brands as well as third-party vendors. 1 “Hotel tech benchmark: Guest-facing technology 2022,” Skift Research, November 2022. The relatively low market penetration rate of this kind of tech points to around $2.4 billion in untapped revenue potential (exhibit).

Even though guest-facing technology is available—the kind that can facilitate contactless interactions and offer travelers convenience and personalized service—the industry is only beginning to explore its potential. A report by Skift Research shows that the hotel industry, in particular, has not tapped into tech’s potential. Only 11 percent of hotels and 25 percent of hotel rooms worldwide are supported by a hotel app or use in-room technology, and only 3 percent of hotels offer keyless entry. 12 “Hotel tech benchmark: Guest-facing technology 2022,” Skift Research, November 2022. Of the five types of technology examined (guest apps and in-room tech; virtual concierge; guest messaging and chatbots; digital check-in and kiosks; and keyless entry), all have relatively low market-penetration rates (see sidebar “Apps and in-room tech: Unused market potential”).

While apps, digitization, and new technology may be the answer to offering better customer experience, there is also the possibility that tourism may face competition from technological advances, particularly virtual experiences. Museums, attractions, and historical sites can be made interactive and, in some cases, more lifelike, through AR/VR technology that can enhance the physical travel experience by reconstructing historical places or events.

Up until now, tourism, arguably, was one of a few sectors that could not easily be replaced by tech. It was not possible to replicate the physical experience of traveling to another place. With the emerging metaverse , this might change. Travelers could potentially enjoy an event or experience from their sofa without any logistical snags, and without the commitment to traveling to another country for any length of time. For example, Google offers virtual tours of the Pyramids of Meroë in Sudan via an immersive online experience available in a range of languages. 13 Mariam Khaled Dabboussi, “Step into the Meroë pyramids with Google,” Google, May 17, 2022. And a crypto banking group, The BCB Group, has created a metaverse city that includes representations of some of the most visited destinations in the world, such as the Great Wall of China and the Statue of Liberty. According to BCB, the total cost of flights, transfers, and entry for all these landmarks would come to $7,600—while a virtual trip would cost just over $2. 14 “What impact can the Metaverse have on the travel industry?,” Middle East Economy, July 29, 2022.

The metaverse holds potential for business travel, too—the meeting, incentives, conferences, and exhibitions (MICE) sector in particular. Participants could take part in activities in the same immersive space while connecting from anywhere, dramatically reducing travel, venue, catering, and other costs. 15 “ Tourism in the metaverse: Can travel go virtual? ,” McKinsey, May 4, 2023.

The allure and convenience of such digital experiences make offering seamless, customer-centric travel and tourism in the real world all the more pressing.

Three innovations to solve hotel staffing shortages

Is the future contactless.

Given the advances in technology, and the many digital innovations and applications that already exist, there is potential for businesses across the travel and tourism spectrum to cope with labor shortages while improving customer experience. Process automation and digitization can also add to process efficiency. Taken together, a combination of outsourcing, remote work, and digital solutions can help to retain existing staff and reduce dependency on roles that employers are struggling to fill (exhibit).

Depending on the customer service approach and direct contact need, we estimate that the travel and tourism industry would be able to cope with a structural labor shortage of around 10 to 15 percent in the long run by operating more flexibly and increasing digital and automated efficiency—while offering the remaining staff an improved total work package.

Outsourcing and remote work could also help resolve the labor shortage

While COVID-19 pushed organizations in a wide variety of sectors to embrace remote work, there are many hospitality roles that rely on direct physical services that cannot be performed remotely, such as laundry, cleaning, maintenance, and facility management. If faced with staff shortages, these roles could be outsourced to third-party professional service providers, and existing staff could be reskilled to take up new positions.

In McKinsey’s experience, the total service cost of this type of work in a typical hotel can make up 10 percent of total operating costs. Most often, these roles are not guest facing. A professional and digital-based solution might become an integrated part of a third-party service for hotels looking to outsource this type of work.

One of the lessons learned in the aftermath of COVID-19 is that many tourism employees moved to similar positions in other sectors because they were disillusioned by working conditions in the industry . Specialist multisector companies have been able to shuffle their staff away from tourism to other sectors that offer steady employment or more regular working hours compared with the long hours and seasonal nature of work in tourism.

The remaining travel and tourism staff may be looking for more flexibility or the option to work from home. This can be an effective solution for retaining employees. For example, a travel agent with specific destination expertise could work from home or be consulted on an needs basis.

In instances where remote work or outsourcing is not viable, there are other solutions that the hospitality industry can explore to improve operational effectiveness as well as employee satisfaction. A more agile staffing model  can better match available labor with peaks and troughs in daily, or even hourly, demand. This could involve combining similar roles or cross-training staff so that they can switch roles. Redesigned roles could potentially improve employee satisfaction by empowering staff to explore new career paths within the hotel’s operations. Combined roles build skills across disciplines—for example, supporting a housekeeper to train and become proficient in other maintenance areas, or a front-desk associate to build managerial skills.

Where management or ownership is shared across properties, roles could be staffed to cover a network of sites, rather than individual hotels. By applying a combination of these approaches, hotels could reduce the number of staff hours needed to keep operations running at the same standard. 16 “ Three innovations to solve hotel staffing shortages ,” McKinsey, April 3, 2023.

Taken together, operational adjustments combined with greater use of technology could provide the tourism industry with a way of overcoming staffing challenges and giving customers the seamless digitally enhanced experiences they expect in other aspects of daily life.

In an industry facing a labor shortage, there are opportunities for tech innovations that can help travel and tourism businesses do more with less, while ensuring that remaining staff are engaged and motivated to stay in the industry. For travelers, this could mean fewer friendly faces, but more meaningful experiences and interactions.

Urs Binggeli is a senior expert in McKinsey’s Zurich office, Zi Chen is a capabilities and insights specialist in the Shanghai office, Steffen Köpke is a capabilities and insights expert in the Düsseldorf office, and Jackey Yu is a partner in the Hong Kong office.

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With the decline in air travel from the pandemic, the classic road trip has become more popular in America.

Here are 8 ways travel will change after the pandemic

What will travel look like in the future? We asked the experts.

With coronavirus cases continuing to spike in America and abroad, travelers with a United States passport remain grounded. To date, just nine countries are open to Americans without restrictions. If Belarus, Serbia , Zambia or any of the other six countries on that list aren’t in the cards, then travelers itching to get on an international flight will have to wait.

How long is still unknown. Elizabeth Becker, author of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism , notes that the pandemic “ decimated ” the $8 trillion global travel industry overnight. “Those essential pillars of 21st-century global travel—open borders, open destinations, and visa-free travel—won’t return in the short term or even medium term,” she says.

What does that mean for the future of travel? Despite the turbulence, experts are seeing blue skies. Bruce Poon Tip, author of Unlearn: The Year the Earth Stood Still and the founder of travel company G Adventures , says not only will we travel again, we’ll do it better. “I still believe travel can be the biggest distributor of wealth the world has ever seen,” he says. “This pause gives us the gift of time to consider how we can travel more consciously.”

From a renewed commitment to sustainable tourism to creative ways to globetrot from home, here’s how travel authors, bloggers, and podcasters are navigating.

( Related: These 25 destinations inspire future journeys and remind us why we love to travel .)

Sustainability will be a driving force

Tourists crowd St. ​Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy, in 2013. In the wake of the pandemic, experts predict there will be more interest in visiting less-crowded places.

One silver lining of the pandemic? Consumers are doubling down on sustainability . Becker predicts travelers will take on the role of “concerned citizens” demanding responsible travel policies. The industry will respond with active measures to prioritize a healthy world over profit margins. “Don’t be surprised if countries mandate ‘fly-free days’ and other measures to control climate change,” she says.

• Nat Geo Expeditions

Take action: Reduce your carbon footprint by purchasing offsets with companies such as Cool Effect and by staying at certified green hotels. Check sites like Book Different , which rates accommodations for eco-friendliness.

( Related: Here’s how Greece is rethinking its once bustling tourism industry .)

Our journeys will become more inclusive

The Black Lives Matter movement has brought the issue of representation to light in all industries, including travel. That’s overdue, says Sarah Greaves-Gabbadon . The award-winning journalist and TV host says she hopes the industry is moving toward meaningful change but worries that any change may be short-lived. “When the pandemic is past and the hashtags are no longer trending, will industry gatekeepers still be eager to attract, cater to, and celebrate travelers of color?” she writes in an email. “I’m cautiously optimistic but not completely convinced.”

Black Travel Alliance ’s Martinique Lewis feels the industry is moving in the right direction and remains hopeful. She notes that companies are addressing the needs of diverse customers and says it’s about time. “For the first time they are considering what a trans female goes through not only when choosing what bathroom to go in at a restaurant, but when she checks into a hotel and her license shows a different person,” says Lewis. “Now plus-size travelers wanting to surf and scuba but can’t because the lack of wetsuits in their size are being acknowledged. Now blind travelers who still want to experience tours and extreme sports while on holiday are thought of.”

Take action: Visit one of the nearly 200 living history museums in the U.S., where historic interpreters portray figures from the past. They shed light on painful issues (such as racism in America) and hidden narratives (such as those of people of color, whose stories have been suppressed).

Small communities will play a bigger role

Travelers can make a difference in small towns that were already struggling economically before the pandemic. Caz Makepeace of Y Travel Blog says she and her family have always traveled slowly to lesser-known areas, “rather than racing through destinations.” Now she’s supporting these places by patronizing local businesses and donating to nonprofits.

Kate Newman of Travel for Difference suggests travelers focus on “ global south ” or developing countries that depend on tourism. “We need to diversify our locations to avoid mass tourism and focus on the places that really need it,” she says. “Seeing so many communities suffer during COVID-19 has brought [this issue] to light.”

Take action: Turn to sustainable tourism educational and advocacy nonprofit Impact Travel Alliance to learn how to empower locals and protect the environment.

We’ll seek quality over quantity

High-mileage travelers are putting more thought into their bucket lists. “COVID-19 has allowed me to rethink how and why I travel,” says Erick Prince of The Minority Nomad . “It’s given me the freedom to explore travel projects for passion instead of the paycheck.” Rather than focusing on paid gigs, the blogger, who lives in Thailand, says he’ll be embarking on a self-funded project to highlight off-the-beaten-track provinces in his adopted country.

Eulanda Osagiede, of Hey Dip Your Toes In , is putting the breaks on international trips, citing travel as a privilege many take for granted. “Privilege comes in many forms, and the act of recognizing our travel-related ones have called us to think about traveling more intentionally and less often—if ever the world begins to look similar to its pre-pandemic days.”

Take action: Check the Transformational Travel Council for resources and recommendations on operators who can help organize meaningful journeys.

The road trip will kick into high gear

For many, road trips may be the only feasible option for travel right now, and frequent fliers like Gabby Beckford of Packs Light are revving up. Driving across state lines can be just as exciting as flying across international borders; it’s about the mindset. “Road-tripping has shown me that the core of travel—curiosity, exposure to newness, and wonder—[is] a perspective, not a destination,” she says.

Take action : Plan a coronavirus-conscious trip to Colorado, home to superlative stargazing sites —and what may become the world’s largest Dark Sky reserve.

Some high-mileage travelers say they plan to focus on meaningful experiences at out-of-the-way areas, like Chimney Tops in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains National Park .

( Related: Check out these eight epic drives across America .)

Travel advisors will become essential

Conde Nast Traveller sustainability editor Juliet Kinsman predicts a shift to booking travel through agents and established operators, noting their invaluable knowledge and industry connections. “I think what 2020 has shown and taught us is the expertise and financial protection of booking through a travel agent often outweighs the amount you pay in commission,” she says. Additionally, she hopes that consumers will look to agents who specialize in the environment. “Those who care about where they send their customers can intuitively cut through greenwash and really ensure every link in the supply chain is an honorable one,” she says.

Related: Amazing architecture you can see from your car window

Take action: Find a travel advisor : The American Society of Travel Advisors maintains a database that allows travelers to search by destination, type of journey (such as eco-tourism or genealogy), and cohort (such as LGBTQ+ travelers). Virtuoso , a network of advisors specializing in luxury travel, can help with good deals, convenient itineraries, and tailored experiences.

We’ll appreciate staying closer to home

Some are discovering the benefits of travel even at home. Blogger Jessie Festa of Epicure & Culture and Jessie on a Journey normally travels internationally once a month. These days, online cultural cooking classes, games, and virtual experiences are helping her “to keep the spirit of travel alive by considering the feelings that travel elicits,” she says. Exchanging postcards with her extended travel community is another “beautiful way to ‘experience’ travel again, safely,” she adds.

“When we compare everything to being locked up indefinitely in our respective towers, a walk to the park can feel like travel,” says blogger Chris Mitchell of Traveling Mitch . “Now people are willing to see the magic in a meal on a patio at a restaurant down the street.”

Take action: Get outside, says the Norwegian concept “ friluftsliv ,” an idea of outdoor living that promises to make the pandemic’s colder months more bearable.

( Related: Here’s why walking is the ideal pandemic activity .)

Planning trips will become joyful again

Although some people are making the best of being grounded, this difficult period is reminding them that travel is important for boosting mental health and personal growth. There’s research to back it up. A 2013 survey of 483 U.S. adults found that travel improves empathy, energy, attention, and focus. Planning a trip is just as effective—a 2014 Cornell study showed that looking forward to travel substantially increases happiness, more than anticipating buying material goods.

Joanna Penn can attest to the healing benefits of both. The U.K.-based author and podcaster behind The Creative Penn and Books and Travel normally travels to research her books. “For me my writing life is all about what I learned when I travel,” she said in a recent podcast, “the ideas that come from being someplace new.” Her future trips will include walking the Camino de Santiago in 2022. Studying maps and determining a route makes her feel like she’s working toward a real goal. “I can expand my comfort zone without too much stress, especially if I accept that things might get canceled,” she said.

Take action: Plan a trip now, with inspiration from this essay on why travel should be considered an essential human activity.

Related Topics

• CORONAVIRUS
• SUSTAINABLE TOURISM
• MENTAL HEALTH
• VOLUNTOURISM

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UN Tourism | Bringing the world closer

Secretary-general’s policy brief on tourism and covid-19, share this content.

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Tourism and COVID-19 – unprecedented economic impacts

The Policy Brief provides an overview of the socio-economic impacts from the pandemic on tourism, including on the millions of livelihoods it sustains. It highlights the role tourism plays in advancing the Sustainable Development Goals, including its relationship with environmental goals and culture. The Brief calls on the urgency of mitigating the impacts on livelihoods, especially for women, youth and informal workers.

The crisis is an opportunity to rethink how tourism interacts with our societies, other economic sectors and our natural resources and ecosystems; to measure and manage it better; to ensure a fair distribution of its benefits and to advance the transition towards a carbon neutral and resilient tourism economy.

The brief provides recommendations in five priority areas to cushion the massive impacts on lives and economies and to rebuild a tourism with people at the center. It features examples of governments support to the sector, calls for a reopening that gives priority to the health and safety of the workers, travelers and host communities and provides a roadmap to transform tourism.

• Tourism is one of the world’s major economic sectors. It is the third-largest export category (after fuels and chemicals) and in 2019 accounted for 7% of global trade .
• For some countries, it can represent over 20% of their GDP and, overall, it is the third largest export sector of the global economy.
• Tourism is one of the sectors most affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, impacting economies, livelihoods, public services and opportunities on all continents. All parts of its vast value-chain have been affected. 
• Export revenues from tourism could fall by $910 billion to $1.2 trillion in 2020. This will have a wider impact and could reduce global GDP by 1.5% to 2.8% .
• Tourism supports one in 10 jobs and provides livelihoods for many millions more in both developing and developed economies.
• In some Small Island Developing States (SIDS), tourism has accounted for as much as 80% of exports, while it also represents important shares of national economies in both developed and developing countries.

100 to 120 MILLON

direct tourism jobs at risk

Massive Impact on Livelihoods

• As many as 100 million direct tourism jobs are at risk , in addition to sectors associated with tourism such as labour-intensive accommodation and food services industries that provide employment for 144 million workers worldwide. Small businesses (which shoulder 80% of global tourism) are particularly vulnerable.
• Women, who make up 54% of the tourism workforce, youth and workers in the informal economy are among the most at-risk categories.
• No nation will be unaffected. Destinations most reliant on tourism for jobs and economic growth are likely to be hit hardest: SIDS, Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and African countries. In Africa, the sector represented 10% of all exports in 2019.  

US$ 910 Billon to US$ 1.2 Trillon

in export from tourism - international visitors' spending

Preserving the Planet -- Mitigating Impacts on Nature and Culture

• The sudden fall in tourism cuts off funding for biodiversity conservation . Some 7% of world tourism relates to wildlife , a segment growing by 3% annually.
• This places jobs at risk and has already led to a rise in poaching, looting and in consumption of bushmeat , partly due to the decreased presence of tourists and staff.
• The impact on biodiversity and ecosystems is particularly critical in SIDS and LDCs. In many African destinations, wildlife accounts for up to 80% of visits, and in many SIDS, tourism revenues enable marine conservation efforts.
• Several examples of community involvement in nature tourism show how communities, including indigenous peoples, have been able to protect their cultural and natural heritage while creating wealth and improve their wellbeing. The impact of COVID-19 on tourism places further pressure on heritage conservation as well as on the cultural and social fabric of communities , particularly for indigenous people and ethnic groups.
• For instance, many intangible cultural heritage practices such as traditional festivals and gatherings have been halted or postponed , and with the closure of markets for handicrafts, products and other goods , indigenous women’s revenues have been particularly impacted.
• 90% of countries have closed World Heritage Sites, with immense socio-economic consequences for communities reliant on tourism. Further, 90% of museums closed and 13% may never reopen.

1.5% to 2.8 of global GDP

Five priorities for tourism’s restart.

The COVID-19 crisis is a watershed moment to align the effort of sustaining livelihoods dependent on tourism to the SDGs and ensuring a more resilient, inclusive, carbon neutral, and resource efficient future.

A roadmap to transform tourism needs to address five priority areas:

• Mitigate socio-economic impacts on livelihoods , particularly women’s employment and economic security.
• Boost competitiveness and build resilience , including through economic diversification, with promotion of domestic and regional tourism where possible, and facilitation of conducive business environment for micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).
• Advance innovation and digital transformation of tourism , including promotion of innovation and investment in digital skills, particularly for workers temporarily without jobs and for job seekers.
• Foster sustainability and green growth to shift towards a resilient, competitive, resource efficient and carbon-neutral tourism sector. Green investments for recovery could target protected areas, renewable energy, smart buildings and the circular economy, among other opportunities.
• Coordination and partnerships to restart and transform sector towards achieving SDGs , ensuring tourism’s restart and recovery puts people first and work together to ease and lift travel restrictions in a responsible and coordinated manner.

a lifelive for

SIDS, LDCs and many AFRICAN COUNTRIES

tourism represents over 30% of exports for the majority of SIDS and 80% for some

Moving Ahead Together

• As countries gradually lift travel restrictions and tourism slowly restarts in many parts of the world, health must continue to be a priority and coordinated heath protocols that protect workers, communities and travellers, while supporting companies and workers, must be firmly in place.
• Only through collective action and international cooperation will we be able to transform tourism, advance its contribution to the 2030 Agenda and its shift towards an inclusive and carbon neutral sector that harnesses innovation and digitalization, embraces local values and communities and creates decent job opportunities for all, leaving no one behind. We are stronger together.

RESOURCES FOR CONSEVATION

of natural and cultural heritage

Related links

• Policy Brief: Tourism and COVID-19
• The Impact of COVID-19 on Tourism
• António Guterres - Video

Roundup: The Future of Travel After the Coronavirus Pandemic

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The Future of Travel After the Coronavirus Pandemic

Travel and tourism will be changed forever. we asked seven leading thinkers for their predictions..

As we enter the first summer of this new era of pandemics, a tenuous easing of travel restrictions has begun. This month, the countries of the European Union will reopen their internal borders, and they plan to allow travel from outside the block some time in July. Singapore and China have begun permitting essential travel between them, but only for passengers who test negative for the coronavirus, use a contact-tracing app, and don’t deviate from their itinerary. Iceland will allow tourists, but it plans to test them for the virus at the airport.

Grounded for many months, airlines are beefing up their summer schedules—though the number of flights will be a fraction of their pre-pandemic frequency. Airports are still mostly ghost towns (some have even been taken over by wildlife ), and international long-distance travel is all but dead. Around the globe, the collapse of the tourist economy has bankrupted hotels, restaurants, bus operators, and car rental agencies—and thrown an estimated 100 million people out of work.

With uncertainty and fear hanging over traveling, no one knows how quickly tourism and business travel will recover, whether we will still fly as much, and what the travel experience will look like once new health security measures are in place. One thing is certain: Until then, there will be many more canceled vacations, business trips, weekend getaways, and family reunions.

To look beyond the summer and help us think about how the pandemic will permanently change the way we travel, Foreign Policy asked seven prominent experts to look into their crystal balls.— Stefan Theil, deputy editor

The Collapse in Travel Will Bring Long-Term Changes

By James Crabtree, associate professor in practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and the author of The Billionaire Raj

Just as mass unemployment leaves indelible scars on labor markets, so the current global travel collapse will bring long-term changes to patterns of international movement for both business and pleasure. Countries with strong pandemic records will deploy them as tourism marketing strategies: Discover Taiwan!

Airlines and hoteliers hope nascent “travel bubbles”—small groups of countries reopening borders only among themselves—and “green lanes” for pre-screened travelers, such as those with antibodies showing immunity to COVID-19, will allow a gradual re-opening. They also hope that roughly normal travel will then resume next year. More likely is that a new system of interlocking safe zones will operate for the foreseeable future, or at least until a vaccine is widely deployed.

Travel will normalize more quickly in safe zones that coped well with COVID-19, such as between South Korea and China, or between Germany and Greece. But in poorer developing countries struggling to manage the pandemic, such as India or Indonesia, any recovery will be painfully slow.

All this will change the structure of future global travel. Many will opt not to move around at all, especially the elderly. Tourists who experiment with new locations in their safe zones or home countries will stick to new habits. Countries with strong pandemic records will deploy them as tourism marketing strategies—discover Taiwan! Much the same will be true for business, where ease of travel and a new sense of common destiny within each safe zone will restructure investment along epidemiological lines.

The Pandemic Caused Us to Fast-Forward Into the Future

By Vivek Wadhwa, fellow at Harvard Law School, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, and co-author of From Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies Can See the Future and Rethink Innovation, forthcoming in September

Over the past month, I’ve spent time with more CEOs than I would meet in a year. They were relaxed, engaged, and attentive. We could brainstorm on ideas for them to reinvent their companies without having gatekeepers or naysayers torpedo the discussions. These were the most productive talks I’ve had with C-level executives—and as you may have guessed, this was all done from the comfort of our homes. Our business meetings, family vacations, and leisure activities will increasingly move into virtual worlds.

Two months ago, it would have been inconceivable to be meeting over Skype or Zoom; now it is the norm. The pandemic caused us to fast-forward ten years into the future and there is no turning back. This is the way a lot of business communications will stay.

We may not realize it, but the videoconferencing technologies we are using are right out of science fiction. Remember the TV series The Jetsons? We now have the videophones that George and Judy used.

The next leap forward will come from virtual reality, which is advancing at breakneck speed and will take us by surprise. Our business meetings, family vacations, and leisure activities will increasingly move into virtual worlds. A trip to Tahiti or Mars, perhaps? The holodecks from Star Trek are on their way.

Travel Could Become Unaffordable for Many

By Elizabeth Becker, the author of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism

Overnight, much of the world went from over-tourism to no tourism. Since then, locals have seen how their lives have improved without those insane crowds: clear skies with vistas stretching for miles, a drastic reduction of litter and waste, clean shorelines and canals, and a return of wildlife. Whatever our income level, travel will take a greater slice of our disposable income.

But business after business went broke without those tourists, revealing how much the global economy depends on non-stop travel. The economic devastation will mean far fewer people can afford to travel. Whatever our income level, travel will take a greater slice of our disposable income.

So be prepared for two dramatically different trends.

Some national and local governments will redesign their tourism strategies to keep down crowds, keep more money in the local economy, and enforce local regulations including those protecting the environment. Many health protocols will become permanent.

Other governments will compete for the shrinking tourist dollar by racing to the bottom, allowing the travel industry to regulate itself, using deep discounts to fill hotels and airplanes and revive over-tourism.

Smart travelers will trust places with good governance and health systems. They will take fewer trips and stay longer. They will see this pandemic as a forecast of what’s to come from the climate crisis. They will act like responsible citizens as well as passionate travelers.

The Freedom to Travel Is Vital to the Post-Pandemic Recovery

By Alexandre de Juniac, the director-general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and a former CEO of Air France-KLM

It’s too early for long-term predictions, but when the first travelers return to the skies, they will find measures that have become commonplace adapted to flying: reduced personal contact, enhanced sanitization, temperature checks, and social distancing. And where sufficient distance isn’t possible—onboard aircraft or in airports—masks will be required. Measures that have become commonplace will be adapted to flying: reduced personal contact, enhanced sanitization, temperature checks, and social distancing.

Within days of 9/11—the last great inflection point for aviation—flying resumed securely. But two decades later, we are still ironing out some of the inconsistencies and inefficiencies of security procedures. This time, months of being mostly grounded have given the airline industry more time to plan and prepare.

With the support of IATA and others, the International Civil Aviation Organization developed a global restart plan to keep people safe when traveling. Restart measures will be bearable for those who need to travel, with universal implementation the priority. It will give governments and travelers the confidence that the system has strong biosafety protections. And it should give regulators the confidence to remove or adjust measures in real time as risk levels change and technology advances.

The freedom to travel will be vital to the post-pandemic recovery. My hope is that we will come out of the crisis with a better passenger experience by moving people through airports more efficiently and increasing confidence in health safety. I am optimistic that this will be a winning result for travelers, governments, the airline industry, and the economy.

We Forgot How Fundamental Travel Was to Modern Life

By James Fallows, a staff writer for The Atlantic and the co-author, with Deborah Fallows, of Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America

Because the process of travel was so routine and often so aggravating, people of the pre-pandemic era rarely concentrated on how fundamental that process—high-volume, high-speed, relatively low-cost human movement—was to the very idea of being modern. What might be lost with a long interruption in easy-connectedness is only now becoming evident.

Students took it for granted that they could aspire to an academic program in a different region, country, or continent—and still go back to visit their families. People who had emigrated permanently, or left their countries for a few years of work or adventure, knew that their homeland was still in relatively quick reach. Children saw their grandparents up close. Families could gather for weddings, births, graduations, funerals. Businesspeople from remote locations went to conventions and conferences to make deals and coordinate plans. The world’s cultural and touristic attractions became open to people from all corners of the globe. For Americans, air travel and international exposure were once such rarities that the now-absurd-sounding term “jet set” actually meant something when it was coined in the 1950s. The commodification of travel allowed people of ordinary means to compose a “bucket list” of sights they wanted to see—and to assume they’d be able to.

Before the lockdown, it was easy to recite all the harm mass travel had done, from the throngs overwhelming Venice or Machu Picchu to the standardization of hotel-and-airport life worldwide. What might be lost with a long interruption in easy-connectedness is only now becoming evident.

There Will Be a Boom in Domestic Travel

By Rolf Potts, the author of four books, including the bestselling travel-philosophy primer Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel

One startling detail about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is that areas with concentrated outbreaks are called hot spots—which is exactly the same phrase the commercial travel industry has used to denote popular and fashionable destinations. This uncomfortable parallel reminds us that travel, in our globalized era, enabled the spread of the virus in a historically unprecedented way. I doubt the desire to go to so-called hot spots or top-ten-list destinations will drive the next wave of travel.

For many people, travel is synonymous with vacations—and that’s fine, but somehow I don’t see vacationers as the model for post-pandemic travel. A constant source of travel headlines in recent years has been tourist overcrowding in places such as Venice and Bali, and I doubt the desire to go to so-called hot spots or top-ten-list destinations will drive the next wave of travel. It will be the desire simply to go, and to figure things out along the journey. Think road trip or backpacking adventure, not package tour.

No doubt the new world of travel will see a boom in domestic travel. Many will go by van or recreational vehicle—and that makes sense, given that one is a lot more self-contained when one travels that way. International travel will also return—and it will be pioneered not just by savvy backpackers and independent travelers going on their own pace and seeing how the journey plays out, but also by working-class folks around the world seeking out family back home, whether that’s in Nigeria, Ecuador, or Poland.

We Will Keep Traveling Because Curiosity Cannot Be Expunged

By Pico Iyer, the author of 15 books that have been translated into 23 languages, most recently Autumn Light and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan

For all our good intentions, we are creatures of habit—and of increasingly diminished attention spans. And COVD-19 has reminded us how little we can confidently say about tomorrow, or even tonight. But my suspicion is that, for better and worse, we will be traveling—and living and making predictions—in June 2021 much as we did in June 2019. For better and worse, we will be traveling in June 2021 much as we did in June 2019.

To some extent, we have to. I was obliged to take three flights in the middle of the pandemic, from Osaka to Santa Barbara, where my 88 year-old mother had just emerged from hospital. A few weeks earlier, I had to fly from Japan to California—for a day—for a public event to which I had long been contractually committed. It would be a blessing for the environment if we all traveled less. And anxiety about travel will be greater next season, and prices higher. But globalism, having spread from person to person for so long, cannot be reversed. Cultural curiosity cannot be expunged. My trips to North Korea have shown me what happens when people cannot get to see the world first-hand.

This article is part of Foreign Policy’s ongoing series about the world after the COVID-19 pandemic. Other installments include:

How the Global Order Will Be Changed Forever by John Allen, Nicholas Burns, Laurie Garrett, Richard N. Haass, G. John Ikenberry, Kishore Mahbubani, Shivshankar Menon, Robin Niblett, Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Shannon K. O’Neil, Kori Schake, Stephen M. Walt

How the Economy Will Look After the Pandemic by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Robert J. Shiller, Gita Gopinath, Carmen M. Reinhart, Adam Posen, Eswar Prasad, Adam Tooze, Laura D’Andrea Tyson, Kishore Mahbubani

How Urban Life Will Be Transformed by Richard Florida, Edward Glaeser, Maimunah Mohd Sharif, Kiran Bedi, Thomas J. Campanella, Chan Heng Chee, Dan Doctoroff, Bruce Katz, Rebecca Katz, Joel Kotkin, Robert Muggah, Janette Sadik-Khan

The Future of Government by James Crabtree, Robert D. Kaplan, Robert Muggah, Kumi Naidoo, Shannon K. O’Neil, Adam Posen, Kenneth Roth, Bruce Schneier, Stephen M. Walt, Alexandra Wrage

The Future of Entertainment, Culture, and Sports by Audrey Azoulay, Rahul Bhatia, Rick Cordella, Mark C. Hanson, Baltasar Kormakur, Jonathan Kuntz, David Clay Large, James S. Snyder

The Future of Schools and Universities by Arne Duncan, Andreas Schleicher, Mona Mourshed, Jennifer Nuzzo, Ludger Woessmann, Salvatore Babones, Davesh Kapur, Michael D. Smith, Dick Startz

How Life in Our Cities Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic

The pandemic is transforming urban life. We asked 12 leading global experts in urban planning, policy, history, and health for their predictions.

How the World Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic

The pandemic will change the world forever. We asked 12 leading global thinkers for their predictions.

How the Economy Will Look After the Coronavirus Pandemic

The pandemic will change the economic and financial order forever. We asked nine leading global thinkers for their predictions.

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Founder of travel firm G Adventures says the future is bright but different for tourism after COVID-19

Bruce poon tip says tourism demand will come roaring back, but the industry must evolve.

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The global tourism industry directly contributed $2.6 trillion to the global GDP in 2017 .  That's about 3.2 per cent of the world's economy, as more than 1.3 billion people spent money while traveling somewhere that year.

Last year Toronto-based G Adventures was responsible for a chunk of those trips, as the company took more than 200,000 people on more than 750 different tour packages to more than 100 countries.

The business has grown briskly over its three decades in existence, to the point where the company now bills itself as the largest independent small group adventure travel company in the world.

But the company has been hit hard like many others during the pandemic, with bookings down 90 per cent since COVID-19 struck.

CEO Bruce Poon Tip has spent his quarantine time writing a free e-book in which he shares his views about the future of the travel industry. In Unlearn, The Year The Earth Stood Still , he writes that the pandemic presents an opportunity for travelers and the tourism industry to change for the better.

He spoke with CBC News recently about what he sees for tourism, post-COVID.

What made you want to write the book and what impact do you hope it will have?

"It started out [as] a love letter or an ode to travelers, because, when everything stopped, I started missing travel. Travel can be a transformative experience not just for the traveler, but in supporting communities around the world. As I kept writing, it just became a bigger story about what the potential we have as an industry. Because all travel companies are kind of at zero right now we have an opportunity to rethink and reset the industry."

What does the new normal for travel look like after COVID-19?

"I think travel is gone a bit awry and people are ... more concerned about amenities. The destination has become irrelevant — with the rise of cruises and all inclusive hotels so you can supply more amenities, whether it's more restaurants or Broadway shows, indoor ziplining, wave pools, indoor go-kart tracks, all kinds of things that they're offering as amenities.

• Canada's airline, tourism sectors facing 'catastrophic' decline due to COVID-19 pandemic

People are living differently at home, we're living more sustainably at home. [But] somehow we think it's OK to disconnect our values when we travel, because we're going to another country. And it's my hope that there's a tipping point where people match those values ... to where you want to go and how you want to do it. And then when you're [at your] destination, it's about having a positive impact in every way — the whole idea of community tourism.

You go there, pay for local restaurants, local hotels where you shop and pay in-hand for services, as opposed to staying in a compound that consumes mass amounts of natural resources, when people outside of those walls don't have access to clean drinking water or medical care."

How important will community tourism be for countries that are underdeveloped?

"I think it's going to play a major part, returning to a lot of those small scale businesses and operations and transportation companies, accommodation companies, restaurants.

I think that there'll be a shift.

I can't see many people wanting to send their 80-year-old parents on a cruise at the moment. And even if a small part of that market changes how they travel, it's a massive impact on a niche market, like our style of travel, and these kind of small scale businesses.

Starting to grow the size of that market, will allow the community tourism concept to just grow and, and have more people benefit and get more people invested in tourism.

What can big hotels, cruise lines and airlines learn from this pandemic?

"I hope most of them learn that the mindset of the traveler is changing, and this might expedite that change. It's been identified in everyone's surveys [that] people are wanting more sustainability, they want a more responsible travel. They want to know what companies are doing.

• Some cruise lines plan to resume sailing as early as this summer, but will passengers get on board?

It's not about having a corporate social responsibility program that you add on to your company to show that you're doing some good things as a business but it's actually actually an intrinsic change to your business model. At the highest level of decision making, these things are taken into consideration and the values of your business matter. How people connect to a brand is a values match more than just a price point."

What does the future look like for you guys at G Adventures?

I think we'll be stronger on the other side.

Like every travel company, we're in hibernation mode at the moment. we're waiting for people to return to traveling. We're starting to see bookings come back and people are starting to think about traveling in the future. It's about being ready. We will return to full strength depending on so many factors — whether it is a vaccine, whether it's a cure, whether ... this goes on for another year, two years. We have to be prepared for every inevitability."

Why do you think the travel industry is going to make a comeback?

"I think that people have a carnal desire or a need to travel. Our ancestors risked their lives to travel. To be the first to discover the world was round and not flat or be the first to the north and south pole. I think we are born explorers and somewhere along the way society makes tourists.

• A major airline will 'most likely' go bust this year because of COVID-19, Boeing CEO says

There will never be a time that people won't have that burning desire to travel. There's been many times we've been forced to pause but there's always a pent up demand right after. It makes us feel it makes us feel alive. It gives you the appreciation of where you come from, and helps you find your place in the universe. I don't think that's going to go away anytime soon."

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This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.

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Continuous Improvement and Innovation During Covid-19 in East Africa: Implications for Future Tourism Policy and Planning

• First Online: 30 April 2024

Cite this chapter

• Kipkosgei Bitok   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4017-354X 2 &
• Duncan Shirandula 2  

Continuous improvement and innovation are important attributes of tourism growth and business success. However, the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic created a new threat to global and Africa’s health, wellbeing, and economy of people. The pandemic highlighted a critical need for public health capacity and a call for improvements and innovations within the tourism industry. This chapter assesses the impact of COVID-19 on the tourism industry in East Africa; and analyzes the innovations and digitization initiatives in hospitality and tourism sectors in the region during the pandemic; including an exploration of policies and plans of innovation for rebuilding the post-pandemic tourism industry. In East Africa, innovations in the hospitality and tourism sectors showcase significant milestones in fighting pandemic spread and encouraging international travel and tourism. Several research methods were employed to review the literature and analyze the data, using a mixture of secondary sources of data. Secondary data sources included a review and analysis of a range of publications on the status of continuous improvements and innovations from the region, and documentation from the Partner States on the status of hospitality and tourism sectors. The findings provide an analysis of policy research on the linkages between continuous improvements during COVID-19 and the performance of tourism at the regional and national/domestic levels. The findings evaluated innovations in the tourism industry during and after the pandemic period across East Africa. The chapter has propounded a continuous improvements and innovation framework for tourism during and post-COVID-19 and recommends unique opportunities for rethinking policies and plans for rebuilding tourism.

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Bitok, K., Shirandula, D. (2024). Continuous Improvement and Innovation During Covid-19 in East Africa: Implications for Future Tourism Policy and Planning. In: Chihwai, P. (eds) COVID-19 Impact on Tourism Performance in Africa. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1931-0_8

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• Solid growth projected for tourism this year

Tourists watch birds at Laohutan scenic area in Dalian, northeast China's Liaoning Province, April 16, 2024. [Photo/Xinhua]

• The tourism sector will continue to grow in the first half of this year, after a prosperous first three months, experts said.

A report released recently by the China Tourism Academy said that in the first quarter of the year the tourism economy had recovered to roughly the level seen at the start of 2019 — before COVID-19 hit — following three quarters of growth. Tourism industry operators expressed growing confidence and people felt a stronger desire for travel in the first quarter.

The report said domestic tourism and related consumption rose 20 percent in the first quarter, with inbound and outbound visits averaging around 20 million a month.

"The tourism economy saw a good opening and stable operation in the first quarter, and the market has stepped into a period of new development," Ma Yiliang, the academy's chief statistician, said at a recent meeting in Beijing.

He said the tourism market has benefited from preferential policies on visas and payments as well as an increase in international flights.

"We've noticed that the increasing travel has brought increasing consumption," he said. "Also, some small cities or less-known destinations such as Harbin, in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, and Tianshui, in northwest China's Gansu province, have gained popularity among young people because of their lower travel costs and good services. With more cities growing as trending destinations, they will invigorate the tourism industry."

Nanjing, capital of the eastern province of Jiangsu, received 65 million visits during the quarter, and the number of travelers on holidays such as Spring Festival was 3.5 times higher than usual, according to the city's culture and tourism bureau. More than 200 million people visited Nanjing last year.

"We estimate that the tourism economy will see a continuous and steady recovery in the first half of the year," Ma said. "Domestic tourist travel and tourism-related revenue will be roughly close to that of the same period of 2019, and inbound and outbound tourism will continuously increase."

In February, the academy estimated that domestic tourism visits will exceed 6 billion this year, with tourism-related revenue of over 6 trillion yuan ($830 billion). It said it expected inbound and outbound visits would surpass 260 million, bringing in international tourism revenue of $100 billion.

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Next pandemic likely to be caused by flu virus, scientists warn

Influenza is still the biggest threat to global health as WHO raises fears about the spread of avian strain

Influenza is the pathogen most likely to trigger a new pandemic in the near future, according to leading scientists.

An international survey, to be published next weekend, will reveal that 57% of senior disease experts now think that a strain of flu virus will be the cause of the next global outbreak of deadly infectious illness .

The belief that influenza is the world’s greatest pandemic threat is based on long-term research showing it is constantly evolving and mutating, said Cologne University’s Jon Salmanton-García, who carried out the study.

“Each winter influenza appears,” he said. “You could describe these outbreaks as little pandemics. They are more or less controlled because the different strains that cause them are not virulent enough – but that will not necessarily be the case for ever.”

Details of the survey – which involved inputs from a total of 187 senior scientists – will be revealed at European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) congress in Barcelona next weekend.

The next most likely cause of a pandemic, after influenza, is likely to be a virus – dubbed Disease X – that is still unknown to science, according to 21% of the experts who took part in the study. They believe the next pandemic will be caused by an as-yet-to-be-identified micro-organism that will appear out of the blue, just as the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the cause of Covid-19 , did, when it started to infect humans in 2019.

Indeed, some scientists still believe Sars-CoV-2 remains a threat, with 15% of the scientists surveyed in the study rating it their most likely cause of a pandemic in the near future.

Other deadly micro-organisms – such as Lassa, Nipah, Ebola and Zika viruses – were rated as serious global threats by only 1% to 2% of respondents. “Influenza remained – by a very large degree, the number one threat in terms of its pandemic potential in the eyes of a large majority of world scientists,” added Salmanton-García.

Last week, the World Health Organization raised fears about the alarming spread of the H5N1 strain of influenza that is causing millions of cases of avian flu across the globe. This outbreak began in 2020 and has led to the deaths or killing of tens of millions of poultry and has also wiped out millions of wild birds.

Most recently, the virus has spread to mammal species, including domestic cattle which are now infected in 12 states in the US, further increasing fears about the risks to humans. The more mammalian species the virus infects, the more opportunities it has to evolve into a strain that is dangerous to humans, Daniel Goldhill, of the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield, told the journal Nature last week.

The appearance of the H5N1 virus in cattle was a surprise, added virologist Ed Hutchinson, of Glasgow University. “Pigs can get avian flu but until recently cattle did not. They were infected with their own strains of the disease. So the appearance of H5N1 in cows was a shock.

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“It means that the risks of the virus getting into more and more farm animals, and then from farm animals into humans just gets higher and higher. The more the virus spreads, then the chances of it mutating so it can spread into humans goes up and up. Basically, we are rolling the dice with this virus.”

To date, there has been no indication that H5N1 is spreading between humans. But in hundreds of cases where humans have been infected through contact with animals over the past 20 years, the impact has been grim. “The mortality rate is extraordinarily high because humans have no natural immunity to the virus”, said Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist of the World Health Organization.

The prospect of a flu pandemic is alarming, although scientists also point out that vaccines against many strains, including H5N1, have already been developed. “If there was an avian flu pandemic it would still be a massive logistical challenge to produce vaccines at the scale and speed that will be needed. However, we would be much further down that road than we were with Covid-19 when a vaccine had to be developed from scratch,” said Hutchinson.

Nevertheless, some lessons of preventing disease spread have been forgotten since the end of the Covid pandemic, said Salmanton-García. “People have gone back to coughing into their hands and then shaking hands with other people. Mask-wearing has disappeared. We are going back to our old bad habits. We may come to regret that.”

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Covid-19 Found in People’s Blood Months After Infection

Lancet study finds covid-19 viral proteins in blood of 25% of people post-covid.

Updated April 26, 2024 | Reviewed by Tyler Woods

• A quarter of people had Covid-19 viral proteins in their blood up to 14 months after infection.
• These proteins in the blood indicate that SARS-CoV-2 keeps living in tissue reservoirs.
• The study used a research-grade test that is not available outside of research labs.
• The strongest evidence to date that Covid-19 persists in the body provides an important clue to Long Covid.

Researchers have detected Covid-19 viral proteins in the blood of 25 percent of patients, even up to 14 months after the initial infection with SARS-CoV-2. This means that for some Long Covid patients, their symptoms could come from ongoing infection.

With the strongest evidence to date that pieces of the Covid-19 virus can go on living and actively replicating inside patients long after the initial infection, a new research study provides an important clue to Long Covid. In the paper, published in Lancet Infectious Diseases , a UC San Francisco/Harvard Medical School team found viral proteins from Covid in the blood of a quarter of patients over a year after their first infection. The team used a new ultra-sensitive blood test to detect SARS-CoV-2 viral proteins in the blood of 171 people who had been infected with Covid.

Viruses can have long-term health effects

According to Michael Peluso, M.D., one of the study authors and an infectious disease researcher at UCSF, the study started when his team that had been focused on HIV pivoted their infrastructure to studying Covid-19. When the pandemic began, the team noted that the public health messages were operating from a common medical framework. When we heard “that this was going to be a two-week illness for everyone and everyone was going to then fully recover and get on with their lives [we knew] that this was almost certainly not going to be true,” says Peluso, “because of what we know about long-term consequences of other infections.”

As early as April 2020, the team began collecting clinical data and blood samples on volunteers after they'd had Covid. They then annotated and stored the samples in order to be prepared to answer whatever questions emerged about the SARS-CoV-2 virus over the next year.

But it was only in the fall of 2020, as the world began to reopen, that the team began to wonder if the Covid virus could persist in the body long-term. “As the healthcare system reopened, a lot of medical procedures required a Covid test. We began seeing a huge number of people who had what were thought to be either false positive Covid tests or reinfections. But when we tried to work them up, none of them were reinfections. Nobody really knew what was going on,” says Peluso.

Ultra-sensitive test for Covid-19 viral proteins

Meanwhile, since 2020 a few studies had published findings suggesting that Covid-19 can persist in the body long after the expected two weeks. Those studies were also very small, and typically looked at a highly selected group of people. In response, the UCSF researchers designed the current study to find out if they could detect evidence of SARS-CoV-2 viral persistence among all comers in their cohort.

One of those small studies was done by David Walt at Harvard. “We had an existing relationship with him and his lab from working together on HIV,” says Peluso. “So we partnered up and basically applied his assay to our samples.” Walt, a highly regarded technology developer, had designed an ultra-sensitive research assay (only available to researchers) called the Simoa (Quanterix) single-molecule array detection platform to measure SARS-CoV-2 spike, S1, and nucleocapsid antigens. The test can find very small amounts of proteins in a sample with almost 1,000 times more sensitivity than the regular tests used by other research groups.

According to Peluso, this single-molecule array is a type of immune assay. Because such immune-based assays are less specific than the commonly used PCR, some skeptics concluded that the prior studies were detecting false positive signals.

Pre-pandemic blood samples proved the test worked

In order to prove that their findings were not a false positive signal, the team ran the same test on 250 samples collected from a mix of people in 2012-2019. The team was able to show that people who had had Covid showed specific proteins in the blood that the pre-pandemic samples did not have.

Less than 2 percent of the pre-pandemic blood samples came up positive, as compared to 25 percent of the blood samples from 171 people who'd had Covid. The team also accounted for vaccination and possible reinfections in their post-pandemic samples, and still found evidence of persistent viral proteins. This means the false positive signal was very low.

A surprisingly high number of people still had Covid in their blood

When they found that 25 percent of people still had Covid-19 viral proteins in their blood up to 14 months after initial infection, “we were actually quite surprised,” says Peluso. They had not expected to find this in so many, because their population was truly undifferentiated and did not distinguish between those who had fully recovered and those who had Long Covid.

“The thing that I find so compelling about the data in this study is that there is a pretty striking relationship between how sick people were during their acute Covid infection and how likely they were to have evidence of antigen persistence,” says Peluso. “To a clinician like me, that is very convincing, because intuitively, it makes sense that people who perhaps have a higher burden of virus upfront would be more likely to have a virus that sticks around.”

Convincing evidence of Covid-19 viral persistence

For Amy Proal, Ph.D., president and research director of PolyBio, which supported the study, “This is very convincing evidence that at least a certain percentage of people are still harboring persistent virus after Covid.” Proal continues, “There is no mechanism by which protein would be present in these samples, especially in the blood where the body would normally degrade it.” Proal explains that it is biologically illogical to think the protein could just persist on its own. Rather, it’s much more likely that it's produced by a virus hiding in tissues and still translating sometimes. (Translating is what happens when a virus takes over our cell’s apparatus and uses it to make copies of itself).

According to a recent paper in Nature Immunology , which Proal authored along with over thirty other researchers from around the world, the SARS-CoV-2 virus can persist in tissues as a reservoir and keep replicating. In another study , the same UCSF team behind the Lancet study also found SARS-CoV-2 RNA in gut tissue up to 600 days after infection. A French team presented a research poster showing Covid spike protein in the blood of long Covid patients, as well as SARS-CoV-2 double-stranded RNA indicative of viral replication in the platelets of Long Covid patients. In children , SARS-CoV-2 RNA has been found in the lymph node tissue hundreds of days after infection.

“We do think that is what's happening with patients,” says Proal. “We know that SARS-CoV-2 is a tissue-associated virus that infects almost every single tissue type of the human body, including the gut, lungs, and brain. We've known from the beginning that the virus itself could be hidden anywhere in tissue and then we wouldn’t find its genetic material with typical blood tests.” Only with a test as sensitive as the one used in the Lancet study could researchers even find the tiny amount of viral proteins that leak into the blood.

In a recent Twitter /X thread on the Lancet study, Proal points out that even the finding that 25 percent of people are harboring Covid virus may be an underestimate. First, proteins from deep reservoirs like the brain or nerves might not make it into the blood. Second, the Covid viral proteins that do leak into the blood may become trapped by immune cells or microclots (sticky collections of amyloid, fibrin, and platelets that stick to blood vessel walls in Long Covid patients) and thus be undetectable in the blood.

Future research needed on Covid-19 viral persistence

While the Lancet study shows strong evidence of Covid-19 viral persistence in the blood, Peluso points out the need for more research before any clinical action can be taken on patients. “There is really a need to replicate this and to conduct a similar study in a much larger patient population,” says Peluso. This study did not differentiate between patients who had Long Covid or who may harbor the virus without symptoms, so the team is planning to expand this out and study hundreds of more people from their cohort. Further, since the symptoms of patients with Long Covid vary from person to person, they would like to sort out whether specific types of long Covid are associated with viral persistence.

Peluso, Michael J., et. al. "Plasma-based antigen persistence in the post-acute phase of COVID-19" The Lancet Infectious Disease , April 08, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(24)00211-1

Proal AD, VanElzakker MB, Aleman S, Bach K, Boribong BP, Buggert M, Cherry S, Chertow DS, Davies HE, Dupont CL, Deeks SG, Eimer W, Ely EW, Fasano A, Freire M, Geng LN, Griffin DE, Henrich TJ, Iwasaki A, Izquierdo-Garcia D, Locci M, Mehandru S, Painter MM, Peluso MJ, Pretorius E, Price DA, Putrino D, Scheuermann RH, Tan GS, Tanzi RE, VanBrocklin HF, Yonker LM, Wherry EJ. SARS-CoV-2 reservoir in post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC). Nat Immunol . 2023 Oct;24(10):1616-1627. doi: 10.1038/s41590-023-01601-2. Epub 2023 Sep 4. Erratum in: Nat Immunol. 2023 Sep 18;: PMID: 37667052.

Peluso, Michael J., et. al. Multimodal Molecular Imaging Reveals Tissue-Based T Cell Activation and Viral RNA Persistence for Up to 2 Years Following COVID-19. MedRxIV preprint. https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.07.27.23293177

Xu, Q., Milanez-Almeida, P., Martins, A.J. et al. Adaptive immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 persist in the pharyngeal lymphoid tissue of children. Nat Immunol 24, 186–199 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41590-022-01367-z

Pretorius, E., Vlok, M., Venter, C. et al. Persistent clotting protein pathology in Long COVID/Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) is accompanied by increased levels of antiplasmin. Cardiovasc Diabetol 20, 172 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12933-021-01359-7

A pediatrician and writer, Dr. Escalante is on a mission to help parents out of the Shouldstorm that disconnects them from their kids. She is raising her own rambunctious boys.

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How quickly is tourism recovering from COVID-19?

The pandemic helped fuel a decline in tourism globally. Image:  Unsplash/Markus Spiske

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.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} Travel and Tourism is affecting economies, industries and global issues

.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;color:#2846F8;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{font-size:1.125rem;}} Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:, travel and tourism.

• Tourists spent an extra 1.8 billion nights in the European Union in 2021 compared with the year before.
• But this is still almost 40% lower than pre-pandemic levels, according to EU statistics.
• Tourism is an important sector for the world economy, and is expected to continue recovering gradually in 2022.
• However, there are still risks – including Russia's invasion of Ukraine and COVID-19 variants.

Tourism was hit particularly hard by the pandemic, as lockdowns restricted people to travelling around their homes and neighbourhoods rather than around the world. But there are now signs that tourist numbers are starting to recover as limitations on movement are eased.

There was a 27% rise in nights spent at EU tourist accommodation in 2021 , according to Eurostat, the statistical office of the EU. This took the total to 1.8 billion, although this was still 37% less than in 2019, before COVID-19.

The first global pandemic in more than 100 years, COVID-19 has spread throughout the world at an unprecedented speed. At the time of writing, 4.5 million cases have been confirmed and more than 300,000 people have died due to the virus.

As countries seek to recover, some of the more long-term economic, business, environmental, societal and technological challenges and opportunities are just beginning to become visible.

To help all stakeholders – communities, governments, businesses and individuals understand the emerging risks and follow-on effects generated by the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Marsh and McLennan and Zurich Insurance Group, has launched its COVID-19 Risks Outlook: A Preliminary Mapping and its Implications - a companion for decision-makers, building on the Forum’s annual Global Risks Report.

Companies are invited to join the Forum’s work to help manage the identified emerging risks of COVID-19 across industries to shape a better future. Read the full COVID-19 Risks Outlook: A Preliminary Mapping and its Implications report here , and our impact story with further information.

Where tourists went

Greece, Spain and Croatia saw the biggest rises in visitors last year, with the number of nights spent at tourist accommodation jumping by more than 70%. Trips to Austria, Latvia and Slovakia fell, but by less than 18%.

“This shows signs of recovery in the tourism sector,” Eurostat says.

However, when 2021 tourist night numbers are compared with 2019, it shows some countries lost more than half their bookings. Latvia, Slovakia, Malta and Hungary were the worst hit.

Denmark and the Netherlands, on the other hand, were the least affected countries. They saw drops of less than 20% in nights spent in tourist accommodation.

Eurostat says the figures are “far less dramatic” than the contrast between 2019 and 2020, when tourism in the EU halved .

Tourism supports jobs

More than 2 million businesses – mostly small and medium-sized companies – make up the EU’s tourism industry , according to the European Parliament.

These firms employ an estimated 12.3 million people, but worker numbers increase to 27.3 million when related sectors are taken into account.

Across the EU in 2018, travel and tourism made up about 4% of GDP – the total value of products and services produced in a country – or 10% if closely related sectors are taken into account.

Three-quarters of these tourism businesses operated in either accommodation or serving food and drink. Italy, France, Spain and Germany were home to 55% of the EU’s tourism firms in 2018.

Have you read?

This is how the covid-19 crisis has affected international tourism, we urgently need to kickstart tourism’s recovery but crisis offers an opportunity to rethink it, a new era of sustainable travel prepares for take-off, global growth and risks.

Tourism is the world’s third-biggest export sector , according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), a special United Nations agency.

Because of COVID-19, tourism lost out on around $1 trillion of export revenues in 2021, UNWTO estimates. It predicts that the tourism industry will recover gradually in 2022 .

International tourist arrivals globally grew 130% in January 2022, UNWTO says. And this was despite the Omicron variant of COVID-19 slowing down the speed of the recovery.

The war in Ukraine also poses a new risk to the global tourism industry – by potentially disrupting the return of confidence to travel, UNWTO says.

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Transportation | Illinois lawmakers to propose merging Chicago…

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Transportation | illinois lawmakers to propose merging chicago area’s transit agencies, amid cta complaints and looming budget woes, the proposal is part of a broader look at the future of transit, as the region’s agencies brace for federal covid-19 relief funding to start running out in the coming years.

The Chicago area’s public bus and rail systems would be combined under a measure Illinois lawmakers are expected to introduce, which would eliminate the CTA, Metra and Pace as separate agencies.

The legislation comes as complaints have mounted over the Chicago Transit Authority’s struggles to provide frequent, reliable and safe service, and days after Gov. J.B. Pritzker called for “ an evolution of the leadership ” at the CTA. But it is linked to an earlier report laying out recommendations about what Chicago-area transit could look like in the future , and marks a decision to pursue the more comprehensive of two options outlined in the report to overhaul oversight of public transportation.

The proposal is part of a broader look at transit funding, as the region’s public transit agencies face a combined $730 million budget hole once federal COVID-19 relief funding starts running out, which could be as soon as 2025. Transit agencies have warned failure to plug the financial hole could lead to catastrophic service cuts and fare increases, and the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning was tasked by the Illinois General Assembly with developing recommendations to overhaul transit, which were delivered to lawmakers in December.

The decision to introduce legislation is a signal of how some lawmakers and civic organizations want to proceed. Already, the transit agencies have sought more state funding, while the civic organizations and lawmakers say funding must be linked to changes to the way transit is overseen. But debate about consolidating the transit agencies and funding could prove thorny in Springfield.

Still, merging the transit agencies has garnered some support. The Civic Federation, a business-backed Chicago watchdog group, recently endorsed the idea, and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle also previously expressed her support for the concept.

Part of the transit budget woes are due to steep drops in ridership since the pandemic altered typical commuting patterns. But at the CTA, in particular, President Dorval Carter has come under fire as the agency has faced a range of complaints, including about so-called ghost buses and trains, long wait times for transit and concerns about personal safety.

State Rep. Eva-Dina Delgado, a Chicago Democrat who plans to sponsor the Illinois House version of the measure, said efforts to revamp transit predate current CTA concerns, but that the agency’s challenges make the conversation more timely.

“Because of some of the challenges that riders are facing, this conversation is top of mind,” she said. “If service was amazing, maybe people wouldn’t be asking, ‘what’s going on with transit?’”

The proposal set to be introduced this week in Springfield is expected to replace the Regional Transportation Authority, which coordinates financing for the agencies, with a new Metropolitan Mobility Authority. The new agency would oversee the operation of buses, trains and paratransit, rather than having the CTA, Metra and Pace each operate their own services.

The proposal would revamp the number of board members on the new agency and who appoints them. The current system is complex and layered, regional planners have pointed out, with 47 board members across the agencies appointed by 21 elected officials. That has given nearly two dozen state, suburban and city officials varying levels of influence on the transit boards.

State Sen. Ram Villivalam, a Chicago Democrat who is set to sponsor the Senate version of the bill, said the system has posed challenges for transit operations.

“Though there are some benefits to that, there are challenges which include, one, ensuring that we have a regional mentality about service, reliability, safety, equity, accessibility and so forth,” he said. “And also accountability. Generally speaking as an agency, ensuring that there is a clear path in terms of accountability.”

The proposal is also expected to seek $1.5 billion in additional funding for transit, though Delgado and Villivalam provided few details about where the money would come from. CMAP’s recommendations for transit floated suggestions such as increasing state funding for existing transit programs, implementing new fees on drivers and expanding the sales tax. But finding new transit funding is unlikely to be simple, as the state is already facing a challenging budget outlook this year.

Delgado said the goal is for discussion about transit oversight to come before conversations about funding.

“The reform has to come first,” she said. “People have to see what we’re going to do to make their experience better before we start talking about revenue.”

The measure is not the first recommendation to get rid of the separate transit agencies, and previous attempts have not been successful. Delgado acknowledged the bill is a “first step” in discussions about reform.

Villivalam, too, said the goal was to begin discussion. The effort could spark conversation about creating one fare system across all of the region’s transit systems, he said, long a focus of transit advocates but one that has seen little progress.

“We want to create this mindset that this is a regional, sustainable public transportation (system),” he said. “It’s not just essential to Illinois, but it’s a regional mindset and it’s integrated and customer service centered.”

The Civic Federation, which was part of a committee advising on the CMAP proposals, recently endorsed creating a single transit agency, saying in an April 25 report the move would provide a “comprehensive solution capable of addressing many of the existing operational inefficiencies while also solving for the calcified cultures, politics and bureaucratic competition dragging down our troubled system.”

One agency could lead to better-coordinated service across the different types of trains and buses and better customer service, the organization said in the report. Now, the separate agencies each compete for limited dollars under an outdated funding formula, the organization said.

Consolidating the agencies could save $200 million to $250 million annually, the Civic Federation said, citing consulting firm Slalom. But consolidation could take time, and the upfront costs could be significant, the report said, without citing a specific dollar amount. Merging pension systems, debt and labor agreements could also be challenging.

Consolidation is the best solution to overcome political considerations and territorial focuses, such as those between Chicago and downstate and the city and suburbs, Civic Federation President Joe Ferguson said. It is also the best way to promote access to economic opportunities, culture and entertainment, he said.

“What we really need to have is a multimodal, integrated system that best assures funding, and the formulas for funding, are applied in a way that (reflects that) need is greatest, and that actually serves, also, the value of equity,” he said.

The concerns about the CTA are an example of what can happen in a fragmented system, he said.

“The fact of the matter is that management and the fiscal situation with respect to the CTA, more broadly, is a leverage moment we should not squander,” he said.

Some of the transit agencies have pushed back on the idea. Carter, in a September letter to CMAP about the organization’s proposals, said focusing on how transit is governed instead of funding would be a “grave mistake” and a “near impossible task to practically accomplish” because providing service is complex.

“To attribute the region’s challenges to anything other than a funding shortage is to perpetuate a narrative that will — at best — serve as a distraction to the funding crisis we face, and — at worst — deepen the disparities of opportunity and access plaguing our region by claiming that it is governance and management issues that are the premier drivers of our challenges,” Carter wrote.

The way transit systems are funded, now, is “discriminatory,” Carter said in the letter, tying funding issues to race. The CTA historically has been underfunded under a 40-year-old deal reached by a downstate- and collar county-controlled Illinois General Assembly when Harold Washington was elected as the city’s first Black mayor, he said.

The deal was intended to ensure the CTA and the mayor’s influence “was always controlled ultimately by other entities,” Carter wrote. He cited the creation of a “suburban-controlled” RTA and a funding formula that sends 49% of the region’s transportation funding to the CTA, which provides 80% of transit trips.

“This legacy funding structure of the region’s transit system has led to decades of inequitable outcomes for black and brown people in terms of access to employment opportunities and the number of jobs reachable within a 45-minute commute,” he said.

The RTA, in response to the Civic Federation report, also highlighted the need for more funding, but Chairman Kirk Dillard said the agency was “open to potential reforms that improve service.”

Chicago-area public transit has consistently been underfunded compared to transit in other parts of the country since before the pandemic, he said in a statement. Talk of reforms must be paired with discussion about finances.

“We welcome discussion on reforms that strengthen coordination, efficiency and accountability across the regional transit system,” he said. “Riders expect and deserve faster, more reliable service, and a safer and more accessible system. But reforms must come with the necessary funding to upgrade service and maximize transit’s impact on the region’s economy, climate, and access to opportunity for all residents.”

Delgado, for her part, characterized the planned legislation as being about equity.

“Oftentimes the people who are riding transit — not always, but often — are the ones that don’t have a choice, that this is their only mode of transportation,” she said. “And I want to make it the gold standard. Maybe this bill starts that conversation and we get a step closer to that.”

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10 years after Flint, the fight to replace lead pipes across the U.S. continues

Emily Kwong

Rachel Carlson

Rebecca Ramirez

The Flint River water starts flowing to Flint, Mich. on April 25, 2014. Without corrosion control, lead leeched from the pipes. Brett Carlsen/Getty Images hide caption

The Flint River water starts flowing to Flint, Mich. on April 25, 2014. Without corrosion control, lead leeched from the pipes.

Almost a decade ago, pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha took to a podium in Flint, Mich. and demanded that the world pay attention to an unfolding water crisis.

The city of Flint was near bankruptcy and controlled by emergency financial managers. To save money, officials decided to switch the municipal water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River on April 25th, 2014. Flint is a majority-Black city, and at the time, an estimated 40% of residents lived in poverty. Many immediately noticed a difference in their water quality.

"We had greenish and brownish water. It smelled weird. It was giving peoples rashes and they were losing hair. Patients were asking, 'Was it okay to use this tap water to mix their babies' formula?" recalls Dr. Hanna-Attisha, associate dean for Public Health at Michigan State University.

State and city officials reassured Flint residents that the water was safe. That wasn't true.

The Two-Way

Lead-laced water in flint: a step-by-step look at the makings of a crisis.

Elin Betanzo , a former employee of the Environmental Protection Agency had also seen a lead crisis unfold in Washington D.C. in 2004. Betanzo implored Hanna-Attisha, a friend from high school, to look into the issue.

"She literally stared me down like, 'Mona, the water doesn't have corrosion control.' That is the moment that I heard about the possibility of lead being in the water. And that's the moment my life changed," Hanna-Attisha remembers.

Corrosion control changes the chemistry of the water to make it less likely for any material in the pipes to leach into the water. Without that corrosion control, the lead in Flint's pipes got into the water supply of tens of thousands of residents.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says no amount of lead in children is safe. Lead poisoning in young children can damage their brains and nervous systems, cause learning and behavioral problems, and harm hearing and speech. In adults , lead exposure is associated with kidney damage, high blood pressure and cardiovascular problems.

After the water source change, Dr. Hanna-Attisha saw a crisis in the making and began looking for data to prove it. On September 24, 2015, a year-and-a-half after that water switch, she went public with her results . They showed that the percentage of children in Flint with elevated levels of lead in their blood had gone up.

At first, the state dismissed her findings. But Hanna-Attisha was right.

Water quality in Flint — and beyond

Today, Hanna-Attisha is the author of the book What the Eyes Don't See and founding director of the Pediatric Public Health Initiative , which connects Flint families to programs aimed to alleviate poverty, support education and improve health outcomes. Rx Kids is a cash-transfer program gives new moms in Flint a no-strings-attached check of $7500.

"In a city that so many folks know as a city that failed kids, Flint is a city that's learning, that's leading with science. That's leading with prevention to promote the healthy development of kids by boldly eradicating infant poverty," she says.

Every new mom in this U.S. city is now getting cash aid for a year

In the last decade, the city's water quality has improved. Thousands of lead pipes in Flint have been replaced, but not all. That means that not every resident in Flint has clean, fresh water.

It's a problem goes well beyond Flint.

Cities and towns all over the United States are facing their own issues with water quality, aging infrastructure and inadequate lead safety protections.

A 2023 report from the EPA revealed that in 2021, lead made up 9% of the nation's service line infrastructure, representing an estimated 9.2 million pipes. Half of those pipes are concentrated in six states: Florida, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and New York.

In Chicago alone, 400,000 homes still get their tap water through lead service lines. A recent study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that nearly 70% of young children in the city are exposed to lead through their home tap water. The study also found that Black and Hispanic neighborhoods are more likely to have lead exposure, but less likely to be tested for lead.

Shots - Health News

Lead in the drinking water is still a problem in the u.s. — especially in chicago, proposed federal rule changes may limit lead exposure.

The Lead and Copper Rule — first issued by the EPA in 1991 — requires local water systems with over 15 parts per billion of lead in the water to initiate corrosion control. But about 90% of cases where local water systems exceeded these limits never got reported to the federal government, according to EPA audits.

"This was probably the worst reported and enforced regulation in the history of the drinking water program," says Elizabeth Southerland, former director of the Office of Science and Technology in the Office of Water at EPA and a current member of the Environmental Protection Network .

What to know about the new EPA rule limiting 'forever chemicals' in tap water

In November 2023, the EPA proposed Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, among them:

• Requiring every water system in country produce a map of where their lead pipes are located
• Improving water sampling and lowering the lead action level from 15 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion
• Requiring the vast majority of water systems to replace all their lead pipes within the next ten year

Chicago, however, would get an exemption to the 10-year timeline, as it would take an estimated 40 years to replace the 400,000 pipes.

"That's decades. That's generations of children and adults consuming lead contaminated water. It's incomprehensible to tell a resident that they need to wait that long for safe drinking water," said Chakena Perry with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Perry and others are pushing for the EPA to close up those exemptions when the rule changes are finalized this fall.

Have questions or comments for us to consider for a future episode? Email us at [email protected] — we'd love to hear from you!

Listen to Short Wave on Spotify , Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts .

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave .

This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez. Pien Huang and Emily Kwong checked the facts. The audio engineer was Patrick Murray.

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Tourism and COVID-19: Impacts and implications for advancing and resetting industry and research

The paper aims to critically review past and emerging literature to help professionals and researchers alike to better understand, manage and valorize both the tourism impacts and transformational affordance of COVID-19. To achieve this, first, the paper discusses why and how the COVID-19 can be a transformational opportunity by discussing the circumstances and the questions raised by the pandemic. By doing this, the paper identifies the fundamental values, institutions and pre-assumptions that the tourism industry and academia should challenge and break through to advance and reset the research and practice frontiers. The paper continues by discussing the major impacts, behaviours and experiences that three major tourism stakeholders (namely tourism demand, supply and destination management organisations and policy makers) are experiencing during three COVID-19 stages (response, recovery and reset). This provides an overview of the type and scale of the COVID-19 tourism impacts and implications for tourism research.

1. Introduction: Setting the necessity and parameters for tourism COVID-19 research

The COVID-19 (declared as a pandemic by WHO, 12 March 2020) of significantly impacts the global economic, political, socio-cultural systems. Health communication strategies and measures (e.g. social distancing, travel and mobility bans, community lockdowns, stay at home campaigns, self- or mandatory-quarantine, curbs on crowding) have halted global travel, tourism and leisure. Being a highly vulnerable industry to numerous environmental, political, socio-economic risks, tourism is used to and has become resilient in bouncing back ( Novelli, Gussing Burgess, Jones, & Ritchie, 2018 ) from various crises and outbreaks (e.g. terrorism, earthquakes, Ebola, SARS, Zika). However, the nature, the unprecedented circumstances and impacts of the COVID-19, demonstrate signs that this crisis is not only different, but it can have profound and long-term structural and transformational changes to tourism as socio-economic activity and industry. Indeed, the global and huge scale, the multidimensional and interconnected impacts challenging current values and systems and leading to a worldwide recession and depression are the most distinctive characteristics of this pandemic.

COVID-19 tourism impacts will be uneven in space and time, and apart from the human tool, estimates show an enormous and international economic impact: international tourist arrivals are estimated to drop to 78% causing a loss of US$ 1.2 trillion in export revenues from tourism and 120 million direct tourism job cuts representing seven times the impact of September 11, and the largest decline in the history ( UNWTO, 2020 ). Being one of the most important global employer (1 in 10 jobs are directly related to tourism, UNWTO, 2020 ) and the major GDP contributor for several countries, tourism and COVID-19 are the epicenter of all international discussions and economies.

Within the burgeoning industry discussions and research about tourism and COVID-19, there is an unanimous call to see and use the pandemic as a transformative opportunity ( Mair, 2020 ). Industry should not only recover but also reimagine and reform the next normal and economic order ( McKinsey, 2020 ), while researchers should not solely use COVID-19 as another context to replicate existing knowledge for measuring and predicting tourism impacts ( Gössling et al., 2020 , Hall et al., 2020 ). Although such studies are important for managing the pandemic, they do not advance knowledge and/or guide the industry to a step beyond. Moreover, because of the interlinked socio-cultural, economic, psychological and political impacts of COVID-19 of this magnitude, unforeseen trajectories instead of historical trends are expected and the predictive power of ‘old’ explanatory models may not work. Moreover, there is enough evidence to claim that both the tourism industry and research have matured to a good extent providing sufficient knowledge about how to study and effectively: (1) design and implement crisis recovery and response strategies (e.g. McKercher & Chon, 2004 ); (2) build resilience to address future crises ( Hall, Prayag, & Amore, 2017 ). What is still lacking is knowledge about how crisis can foster industry change, how companies can convert this crisis disruption into transformative innovation and how to conduct research that can enable, inform and shape the rethinking and resetting of a next normal.

Crises can be a change trigger, but none crisis has been so far a significant transition event in tourism ( Hall et al., 2020 ). Crises have also been used as a political tool to stabilize existing structures and diminish the possibility of collective mobilization ( Masco, 2017 ). As change can be selective and/or optional for the tourism stakeholders (e.g. tourists, operators, destination organisations, policy makers, local communities, employees), the nature and degree of crises-led transformations depend on whether and how these stakeholders are affected by, respond to, recover and reflect on crises. Consequently, to better understand, predict but also inform and shape change, tourism COVID-19 research should provide a deeper examination and understanding of the tourism stakeholders’ (behavioural, cognitive, emotional, psychological and even ideological) drivers, actions and reactions to their COVID-19 impacts. Research should also examine and understand the stakeholders’ lived and perceived COVID-19 experiences as well as their consciousness, mindfulness, capabilities and willingness to understand and act (pro-actively and re-actively) to the pandemic, as all these can equally influence their attitudes, behaviours and change potential.

COVID-19 tourism research should also advance our knowledge for informing, fostering, shaping or even leading such crises-enabled transformations. Otherwise, we will simply experience one crisis after the other ( Lew, 2020 ). Responding to the mushrooming euphoria of COVID-19 tourism related research, Gretzel et al. (2020) also plead for transformative e-tourism research that can shape tourism futures by making value systems, institutional logics, scientific paradigms and technology notions visible and transformable. To achieve scientific paradigm shifts, e-tourism research should embrace historicity, reflexivity, transparency, equity, plurality and creativity ( Gretzel et al., 2020 ). To avoid the bubble of the COVID-19 research orgasm and advance tourism research, others have also suggested to adopt inter-disciplinary ( Wen, Wang, Kozak, Liu, & Hou, 2020 ), multi-disciplinary ( Gössling et al., 2020 , Hall et al., 2020 ) or even anti-disciplinary ( Sigala, 2018 ) research to enable out-of-the-box, creative and flexible thinking that challenges and goes beyond existing pre-assumptions and mindsets.

To address these needs and gaps, this paper aims to critically review past and emerging literature to help professionals and researchers alike to better understand, manage and valorize both the tourism impacts and transformational affordance of COVID-19. To achieve this, first, the paper discusses why and how the COVID-19 can be a transformational opportunity by discussing the circumstances and the questions raised by the pandemic. By doing this, the paper identifies the fundamental values, institutions and pre-assumptions that the tourism industry and academia should challenge and break through to advance and reset the research and practice frontiers. The paper continues by discussing the major impacts, behaviours and experiences that three major tourism stakeholders (namely tourism demand, supply and destination management organisations and policy makers) are experiencing during three COVID-19 stages (response, recovery and reset). This analysis is useful because it provides an overview and understanding of the type and scale of the COVID-19 tourism impacts, while it also demonstrates that the way in which stakeholders and researchers understand, react and behave in each stage may form and set the next (new) normal in the post COVID-19 era. Responding to the call for transformative research, discussions are developed based on the rational that tourism research should go beyond replicating and reconfirming existing knowledge within the COVID-19 context; instead tourism COVID-19 research should see new things and see them differently to inform and guide tourism futures. Hence, the paper suggests potential new research areas and theoretical lenses that can be used for advancing and resetting industry practice and research. The paper does not aim to provide a fully comprehensive and inclusive analysis of all the impacts, theories, topics and tourism stakeholders that COVID-19 tourism research can examine. Instead, it aims to provide practical and theoretical implications on how to better research, understand, manage and transformative valorize COVID-19 tourism impacts.

2. COVID-19 circumstances and tourism: Shifting the research focus to challenge, reset and contradict institutional logics, systems and assumptions

Research investigating, measuring and predicting the COVID-19 tourism impacts is important in order to eliminate ‘casualties’, draft, monitor and improve response strategies (i.e. you cannot manage what you cannot measure). However, research focusing on the features and impacts of crises instead of their structural roots tends to conceal and stabilize the conditions and corollary social structures through which crises are produced ( Barrios, 2017: 151 ). Investigating the real roots of COVID-19 may go beyond the boundaries and scope of tourism research. Yet, the latter needs to look into and challenge the tourism ‘circumstances’ and structures that have enabled and sometimes accelerated the global spread and impact of COVID-19. Unfortunately, the economists downplay the pandemic as a purely natural event originating and operating outside of the economic system ( Nowlin, 2017 ). But, treating COVID-19 as an exogenous shock and phenomenon that has nothing to do with socio-economic structures and values, can perpetuate and strengthen the pandemic roots during the post COVID-era as well as constrain change and transformational processes.

COVID-19 is a crisis of the economized societies rooted in the growth-paradigm ( Ötsch, 2020 ). COVID-19 is also a result of the intersection of broader processes of urbanisation, globalisation, environmental change, agribusiness and contemporary capitalism ( Allen et al., 2017 ). The nature of tourism (requiring traveling) and its evolution and growth paradigms are a significant contributor to such circumstances and the current socio-economic system accelerating the spread and impact of this contagious and infectious virus. Tourism is a result but also responsible for: our highly interconnected and global world; pollution, waste and climate change; global, national and regional economic development and growth; superiority of capitalism values in people’s and business decision-making but also policy and politics formulations. As climate change increases the frequency of pandemics and outbreaks, pandemics are expected to become more common in the future ( World Economic Forum (2019) (2019), 2019 ), which in turn highlights the interwoven nature and vicious circle forces between the biological, physical and socio-economic systems.

Moreover, the economic system and mindset contributing to the COVID-19 has also been guiding and shaping the COVID-19 response and recovery strategies of governments, institutions, businesses and people alike. This can significantly perpetuate and repeat crises as we are treating their symptoms and not their roots. For example, economic priorities for maintaining business continuity and jobs, resume and recovering to the old ‘economic success growth’, have been driving governments’ policies and practices such as: economic support (e.g. subsidies, tax reliefs) to tourism businesses and employees; debates for relaxation of restrictions for re-opening and re-starting economies at the expense of a second way and human lives. Similarly, people have engaged in panic buying and (over)-consumption of online experiences (e.g. virtual entertainment, dining, drinking, traveling) during lock-downs, that demonstrate their persistence, preference and fear of loosing to their ‘consumerism’ traditional lifestyles deemed essential for their success and happiness. Early COVID-19 tourism research also reinforces a similar mindset, e.g. many studies trying to measure the economic impacts of COVID-19 trading them off to socio-cultural and biological impacts, studies aiming to predict and measure when tourists will start traveling again and when we can reach the old tourism targets. As governments race to minimise economic losses, and be the first to reopen borders and (tourism) businesses, and financial markets, investors, cash liquidity and financial survival are equally pressing multinational and small tourism enterprises, they are all also looking for tourism research that can ‘feed’ and ‘reconfirm’ their mindset and help them resume operations based on the old paradigms and business models they are founded. Debates and research are based on trading between economic benefits and losses in exchange of human rights, lives, morals and ethics. There is no discussion why trade-offs are the best methodology and mindset to decide, no one has re-imagined ‘solutions’ enabling co-existence or regenerative forces between these concepts.

Overall, research, education and our socio-economic and political system (which they shape and are shaped by each other), have all framed our mindset on how we research, measure, understand, respond and aim to recover from the COVID-19. Consequently, we have converted COVID-19 from a biological virus contagion to a financial crisis contagion and recently, an economic race to re-build our old financial competitiveness. To avoid such perpetuations, tourism research should assume more responsibility in informing, driving and leading sustainable futures. To that end, COVID-19 tourism research should not be solely seen, conducted and used as a useful tool to help resume old states. Instead, COVID-19 tourism research should also challenge our growth-paradigms and assumptions that have led to the current situation and enable us to reimagine and reset tourism (e.g. Ioannides and Gyimóthy, 2020 , Gössling et al., 2020 , Hall et al., 2020 , Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020 ). To achieve this, COVID-19 tourism research should criticize ontological and epistemological foundations and assumptions that underpin the current science and growth paradigms ( Brodbeck, 2019 ). It should also deconstruct and challenge the mechanisms and systems that sustain the deleterious unsustainable tourism evolution ( Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020 ). But to regenerate and transform tourism and its socio-economic system, tourism research should not only support new ways and perspectives of researching, knowing and evolving. COVID-19 tourism research should also inspire, motivate and inform all tourism stakeholders alike to adopt new ways of being, doing and politicising. For example:

At a macro-level, COVID-19 tourism research should generate dethinking, rethinking and unthinking of pre-assumptions and mindsets including ( Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020 ): globalisation as an unstoppable force; neoliberal capitalism as the best system and decision-making tool for organizing and allocating resources; growth as the sole way for development and success. It should also challenge the ‘surveillance capitalism’, whose institutionalisation and normalisation is perceived as inevitable and unstoppable because of forces including ( Zuboff, 2015 ): institutionalised facts (e.g. data collection, analytics and mining); leading tech and disrupting companies being respected and treated as emissaries of a better future solving the “faults of capitalism” (e.g. sharing economy platforms ‘democraticing’ micro-entrepreneurship); and people seeing technologies as a necessity requirement for social and civic participation, securing employment and addressing the increasingly stressful, competitive, and stratified struggle for effective life. The COVID-19 is accelerating the institutionalisation and acceptance of this algorithmic governance, management and society, previously contested as violations of human rights, privacy and laws ( Zysman, 2006 ), but now becoming normalised in the name of health and common good.

Technology is at the core of solutions for combating the COVID-19 and re-opening tourism and the economy (e.g. mobility tracing apps, robotised-AI touchless service delivery, digital health passports and identity controls, social distancing and crowding control technologies, big data for fast and real time decision-making, humanoid robots delivering materials, disinfecting and sterilizing public spaces, detecting or measuring body temperature, providing safety or security), while technology is seen as a panacea to our COVID-19 driven-needs to normalise surveillance, to ensure health and safety, to collect and analyse personal data for fast decision-making. Although COVID-19 tourism research cannot stop these technological advances, it should fight this digital trojan horse from the inside by questioning and resetting their purposes, designs and affordances, interpretations and application ethics. Technologies are constituted by unique affordances, whose development and expression are shaped by the institutional logics in which technologies are designed, implemented, and used ( Zuboff, 2015 ). COVID-19 tourism research could simply investigate and advance our information and technological capabilities to collect, analyse and use (big) data for better knowing, predicting, controlling, and modifying human behavior (e.g. tourists and employees behaviour) as a means to produce revenue and market control ( Zuboff, 2015 ). But such research will simply further support the making of everydayness qua data imprints an intrinsic component of organizational and institutional life and a primary target of commercialization strategies ( Constantiou & Kallinikos, 2015 ). Technologies have always been an enabler, a catalyst of innovation and change, a disruptor of tourism, as well as a tool to build tourism resilience in crisis ( Hall et al., 2017 ). The COVID-19 has further enhanced the role of technologies in the recovery and reimagination of tourism, while it reinforces existing paradigms in the e-tourism evolution. Developmental trends and adoption of smart destinations and tourism services, AI, robotics and other digital advances are now accelerated to combat the COVID-19 tourism implications. COVID-19 tourism research should reimagine and re-shape the purposes, usage and means of such technological advances that significantly form how our societies and economies are being transformed, how tourism is being practiced, managed and evolves with the help and/or because of the COVID-19.

At a micro-level, COVID-19 tourism research should question and reset why tourism is viewed, practiced and managed as a way to ‘escape’, ‘relax’, ‘socialise’, ‘construct identities/status’, ‘learn’ and reward themselves from a routine, unpleasant and meaningless life. Why tourism should be researched and practiced as an escape from a boring life, instead of life being rewarding and meaningful itself? Why people have to travel thousands of miles away from home to ‘learn’ and ‘be happy’? Why companies have to commercialize and commoditize communities, people and their tangible and intangible resources as tourism attractions ‘please’ the tourists’ needs and drive economic development? Tourism paradigms and mindsets like this, have led and intensified crises like COVID-19 and this cannot be sustainable for much longer. Consumerism and tourism should not be seen as the sole way to achieve happiness, self-expression, and (economic) development. COVID-19 tourism research should inspire tourists, businesses and destinations alike to re-imagine and reset new mindsets, frontiers and behaviours such as: how to use and develop tourism to valorize and not consume tourism resources, to generate well-being, sustainability and transformational learning; how to study and practice environmental/sustainable management not as a legal necessity for lobbying and formulating policies, not as marketing tool to build brands’ and people’s identities, not as an expense to be minimized, but as a mindful business investment and personal lifestyle for a responsible future.

Overall, COVID-19 tourism research should not only be the mean to overcome the crisis and resume previously chartered economic growth trajectories. It should lead the refocusing, repurposing, reframing and re-interpretation of research questions, methodologies and outcomes, so that tourism stakeholders can in turn re-direct their actioning, conduct and evolution. To that end, COVID-19 tourism research will be benefited by embedding, adapting, reflecting and expanding the theoretical lenses and perspectives of a much greater plurality of disciplines and constructs to guide and implement research. Transformative (service) research, philosophy, criminology, ethics, law, anthropology, behavioural and religious studies, political science and diplomacy, governance, bioethics, rhetoric. Researching within unchartered waters, COVID-19 tourism research may also need to apply new methodological approaches and tools that are capable to combat roots and not symptoms of tourism crises and use the latter as transformational opportunity to reset research agendas and re-imagine and re-shape unthinkable tourism futures. Due to the newness of the field qualitative approaches such as (cyber)ethnography and the need for urgent, fast and real-time research processes and outcomes, COVID-19 tourism research may also need to intensify and advance “new” methods of (big) data collection, analysis and interpretation/visualization, such as participatory sensing (i.e. using tourists as sensors for data collection).

Paradox research, as a meta-theory and/or methodology, can also be very instrumental for informing and supporting COVID-19 tourism research. Originating in philosophy and psychology (e.g. Aristotle, Confucius, Freud), paradox research (also frequently requiring multi-disciplinarity) has helped to inform, advance and transform management science research ( Schad, Lewis, Raisch, & Smith, 2016 ) and organisations ( Cameron & Quinn, 1988 ) alike. As a meta-theory, paradox research offers a powerful lens for enriching extant theories and fostering theorizing processes in management science, because it provides deeper understanding and conceptualisation of constructs, relationships, and dynamics surrounding organizational tensions. By investigating contradictions between interdependent elements that are seemingly distinct and oppositional, one can better unravel how one element actually informs and defines the another, tied in a web of eternal mutuality. As a methodology, the paradox lens encourages researchers to approach organizational paradoxes paradoxically ( Cameron & Quinn, 1988 ). Incorporating paradox research into COVID-19 research may also be inevitable, as the COVID-19 circumstances, impacts and debates have uncovered and intensified existing paradoxes, but also generated new ones. Paradox research is also paramount to COVID-19 tourism research, if the latter is to become innovative and transformative. These are because (adapted by Schad et al., 2016 ):

• • Interruptions in socio-economic life can reveal structural contradictions and paradoxes, and by studying and understanding them, one can make the crisis positive and transformative
• • paradoxes intensify, grow and intensify, as contemporary organizations and their environments become increasingly global, fast-paced, and complex; the evolution and circumstances of tourism and COVID-19 are a strong evidence of a highly interconnected, fast paced and complex world
• • paradox is a powerful meta-theorizing tool: opposing theoretical views may enable vital insights into persistent and interdependent contradictions, fostering richer, more creative, and more relevant theorizing
• • paradox identifies and challenges our pre-assumptions: as antinomies, theoretical paradoxes remain perplexing, even paralyzing, when researchers are confined by the past and/or assumptions
• • paradox help us think creatively and out-of-the box, because contradictions provoke established certainties and tempts untapped creativity

Paradox research is limitedly used within tourism research, but its applicability, versatility and value are shown already in investigating: macro-level tourism and destination management issues ( Williams & Ponsford, 2009 ); business operations ( Sigala, Airey, Jones, & Lockwood, 2004 ) and tourism demand ( Mawby, 2000 ). However, as the present and post COVID-19 era is a fertile ground of persistent and new paradoxes in tourism, tourism researchers should seriously consider adopting a paradox lense. For example, the circumstances of COVID-19 (e.g. stay at home lockdowns, social distancing) have necessitated and accelerated the use of technologies by both tourists (e.g. information about travel restrictions, online crisis communication, online COVID-19 alerts and hygiene measures) and businesses (e.g. online food delivery, virtual dining, virtual wine experiences, festivals/events, virtual visits of museums, destinations). However, persistent ‘paradoxes’ (e.g. increase use of social media and loneliness, democratisation of information accessibility and information darkness, technology and (small) business empowerment/equalizing competition rules) are questioning the effectiveness of such technology solutions and have fuelled debates on whether they are a ‘cure’ or a ‘fertiliser’ and “diffuser’ of the pandemic. Not everyone has access to technology and those that they have do not necessarily have the capabilities and knowledge to effectively use the technology tools and information. The persistent digital divide found in consumers and businesses (which mainly represents a socio-economic divide of citizens and size of businesses), has converted the pandemic to an infodemic (e.g. lack or mis-information, diffusion of fake COVID-19 news and advices, emotional contagion of global depression and mental health) and a tool deepening the economic divide and competitive gap between larger and smaller tourism operators. Digital inequalities in tourists potentiated their vulnerability to COVID-19 (e.g. putting themselves and their loved one in health risk while traveling or willing to travel during and after the COVID-19), while COVID-19 vulnerability potentiate to enlarge the digital inequalities [e.g. those who have the tools and means to easier go through the COVID-19 impacts will also be the only ones who can pay and access virtual tourism experiences, who will be well informed on how, where and when travel and who will be able to afford to travel in the future, as increased (hygiene and technology) operating costs and transportation oligopolies may increase costs of tourism]. Similarly, digital inequalities in tourism businesses potentiate COVID-19 vulnerability (as larger operators that were technology ready and ‘inherited’ by size resilience, were the first and maybe the only ones to be able to virtualise operations and experiences for maintaining business liquidity, surviving, re-opening and recovering post COVID-19), while COVID-19 vulnerability increases digital and economic inequalities in the tourism competitive landscape (e.g. larger companies/destinations which are characterised by greater cash liquidity, know-how, technology readiness and resilience and so, have lower COVID-19 vulnerability, will be the ones to survive and thrive post COVID-19). Paradox research that can investigate such contradictions between the abovementioned distinct and oppositional, but also elements interdependent elements can better define, understand, manage and address their concepts and the dynamics of their web of eternal mutuality.

The COVID-19 fortified and generated many other paradoxes, which are also identifiable at all tourism management levels (macro, meso and micro) and COVID-19 tourism research can investigate for advancing and transforming research. Table 1 provides some ideas for applying such paradoxes in COVID-19 tourism research.

Paradox Research: advancing and transforming COVID-19 tourism research.

3. COVID19: Dismantling and re-mantling tourism in three stages

It is widely accepted that crisis management needs to be implemented before, during and after a crisis. Table 2 provides an overview of the impacts and implications of COVID-19 on three major stakeholders (tourism demand, tourism operators, destinations and policy makers) under three stages (representing the respond, recovery and restart stage from the pandemic) to incorporate a transformational stage envisioned in the post COVID-19 era. COVID-19 tourism research does not have to address issues in the last stage in order to be transformative. It can equally be transformative if it re-examines ‘existing’ issues and relations but through new theoretical lenses and/or methodological approaches by embedding a plurality of ‘new’ disciplines into the research designs. By doing this, one can significantly unravel unknown issues and dynamics, provide a better explanatory power and understanding of concepts and relations as well as identify and test new ‘remedies’.

COVID-19 and tourism in three stages: major impacts and some ideas for future research.

3.1. Tourism demand

Tourists have experienced themselves, through their loved ones and/or through the shared experiences of others (e.g. user-generated-content) significant disruptions and health-risks in their travel and bookings plans. The tourists’ experiences and/or exposure to others’ experiences (that are also magnified through the emotional contagion and information diffusion of the social media) can have a significant impact on their travel attitudes, intentions and future behaviours. Psychiatric research investigating the impact of traumatic experiences on people’s life, behaviours and experiences of places and services (e.g. Baxter & Diehl, 1998 ) can provide a useful theoretical lenses for understanding the travel behavior and attitudes of tourists that have been exposed to own or others’ COVID-19 travel trauma. Tourism research has mainly focused on studying how tourists develop their perceived risk and the impacts of the latter on tourists’ decision-making processes, future intentions and segmentation profiles (e.g. Dolnicar, 2005 , Aliperti and Cruz, 2019 , Araña and León, 2008 ). Others have also examined the impact of the tourists’ perception of crisis management preparedness certification on their travel intentions (e.g. Pennington-Gray, Schroeder, Wu, Donohoe, & Cahyanto, 2014 ). Such research is important, as risk perceptions are important for predicting future tourism demand and drafting appropriate recovery strategies ( Rittichainuwat & Chakraborty, 2009 ). It is also relevant for COVID-19 tourism research because of the new COVID-19 standards and certification rules that companies are now required to adopt. Research has shown that perceptions of risks may differ between tourists with different origin-country, final destination, age, sex and the typology of travel ( Rittichainuwat & Chakraborty, 2009 ). However, the impact of crisis communication and social media on perceived risk has been totally ignored. Some research is done for examining the impact of social media use on tourists’ mental health ( Zheng, Goh, & Wen, 2020 ) and crisis information systems and communication – social media ( Sigala, 2012 , Yu et al., 2020 ), however, given the increasing role and impact of social media on crisis communication and people’s health and risks perceptions, this is an area where more research is granted. As a vaccine for COVID-19 may take long to be developed and travelers may need to live with it, tourism research might benefit from medical and health research investigating how people behave, live and cope with chronic and lifestyle-related diseases (e.g. AIDS).

During lockdowns, people have experienced and become familiar with virtual services and tourism experiences. Research in technology adoption would claim that increased technology familiarity and trialability will increase its adoption. But will this apply for the controversial technologies introduced by COVID-19? Political economy and law research explaining how people react and accept human rights ‘violations’ (e.g. surveillance measures, freedom of speech, lockdowns) under conditions of ‘state of exception’ like terrorism or the COVID-19 ( Carriere, 2019 , Bozzoli and Müller, 2011 , Scheppele, 2003 ) can provide a new lenses for studying adoption of the COVID-19 controversial technologies and restrictions Research on political ideologies could further enlighten why people’s ideologies and political values may further perplex their reactions and behaviours to such interventions in their human rights.

It is claimed that while experiencing low pace, new lifestyles and working patterns, people are reflecting and recalibrating their priorities and social values. Is that true in relation to their travel behavior? Would people require and expect greater responsibility and sustainability from tourism operators and destinations? Would they be motivated to travel more but for a meaningful purpose? Or would people go back to their previous travel behaviours and preferences? Past research ( Pieters, 2013 ) has shown that consumers face a “material trap” in which materialism fosters social isolation and which in turn reinforces materialism. This might explain why during lockdowns people increased their online shopping and consumption of virtual entertainment and probably they might not have reflected and reset their values. Is that true and what is its impact on tourists’ behaviours? Consumer psychology and behavioural science explaining how people wish to align the time they spend with their values (congruence theory) can provide useful insights into such investigations. In addition, religion and spirituality studies can further enlighten the impact of COVID-19’s living conditions on tourists’ tourism sustainability preferences and attitudes as well as responses to tourism operators’ and destination sustainability practices and communications. This is because religion and spirituality is found to play an important role in influencing individuals’ thoughts and behaviors ( Laurin, Kay, & Fitzsimons, 2012 ).

Social distancing imposed by COVID-19 includes actions such as, reducing social contact, avoiding crowded places, or minimizing travel. Social distancing can significantly impact how people experience and evaluate leisure and travel activities like hiking, outdoor activities and nature-based tourism or even personal services like spas, dining, concierge services. Social distancing or better physical distancing may influence tourists’ perceptions of health hazards, insecurity and unpleasant tourism experiences. But how ‘far’ away is enough for tourism employees and other customers to be from each other without compromising sociality, personal service and perceptions of social distancing measures? Social distancing has not been studied before in service provision, while law and criminology research on ‘sexual’ consent may provide a different perspective on how people define social space and the ‘invasion’ or not of others into it.

Tourism is heavily a hedonic and sensorial experience. Servicescape design plays a major role in tourism experience by influencing customers’ emotions, behaviors, attitudes and service evaluations. However, COVID-19 operating standards require servicescapes to be redesigned eliminating or inhibiting sensorial elements and ‘changing’ tourism experiences, e.g.: smell of cleanliness instead of fragrance; social distancing and number of co-presence of clients in restaurants, festivals and other tourism settings will influence new standards of psychological comfort and acceptable levels of perceived crowdness; raised voices may generate a wider “moist breath zone” increasing viral spread; warmer temperatures create relaxing environments encouraging customers to stay and spend more, but poorly ventilated or air-conditioned indoor spaces may spread COVID-19. Would tourists and tourism firms change their behaviour and attitudes towards these new COVID-19 servicescapes? What new service etiquettes, customer expectations, behaviours and experiences would COVID-19 determined servicescapes and operational procedures may generate?

These and many other fields of research have been raised due to COVID-19 conditions, and as explained a plurality of theoretical lenses can be beneficial to provide a better understanding of these new concepts introduced in tourism research.

3.2. Tourism supply – Businesses

Tourism businesses have been racing to ensure the safety of their employees, customers, brand image and cash liquidity. To re-start, tourism companies are re-designing experiences (e.g. winery experiences, museum visits, tours, sports events, in-room dining and entertainment instead of hotel facilities) to feature smaller groups of tourists, outdoor activities and/or private experiences complying with social distancing and gathering restrictions and travellers’ expectations. Tourism companies have already upgraded their cleaning procedures by adopting new standards and restraining staff. Many of companies promote their hygiene certifications accredited by health expert associations. Tourism professionals are being trained to become ‘contact tracers’ obtaining relevant certifications confirming their skills to identify cases, build rapport and community with cases, identify their contact and stop community transmission. Restaurants, hotels, airports, public spaces are re-engineering their operations to make them contact-free or contactless. Mobile apps (for check-in, check-out, room keys, mobile payments, bookings-purchases), self-service kiosks, in-room technologies for entertainment and destination e-shopping (e.g. virtual reality for destination virtual visits to museums, attractions and destinations, movies), robots (for reception and concierge services, food delivery museum guides), artificial intelligence enabled websites and chatbox for customer communication and services, digital payments (e.g. digital wallets, paypal, credit cards). In addition, the new operating environment enforced by COVID-19 measures require firms to adopt new technologies and applications to ensure management of crowds and number of people gathered in public spaces (e.g. airports, shopping malls, museums, restaurants, hotels), human disinfectors and hand sanitiser equipment, applications identifying and managing people’s health identity and profiles.

Research can conduct a reality check and benchmarking of the effectiveness of the various respond and recovery strategies adopted by tourism operators. Research can also investigate the role and the way to build resilience to fast develop and implement such strategies. However, such research is useful and important but probably not enough for investigating the resetting of the next tourism industry normal. Transformative COVID-19 research should help industry to reimagine and implement an operating environment that is human-centred and responsible to sustainability and well-being values.

3.3. Destination management organisations and policy makers

Governments and destinations have been providing stimulus packages and interventions (e.g. tax reliefs, subsidies, deferrals of payments) to ensure the viability and continuity of tourism firms and jobs. Governments have intervened in mobility restriction and closures of businesses. Because of these, COVID-19 has resulted in a greater intervention of governments in the functioning and operations of the tourism industry. The government has also become a much bigger actor in the tourism economy (e.g. re-nationalisation of airlines and other tourism firms and tourism infrastructure like airports). This is very unique for COVID-19, as previous crises have generated research and institutional interest, but they did not have policy impact, specifically in tourism ( Hall et al., 2020 ). Would such government interventions and role sustain in the future? How will this influence the structure and functioning of the industry at a national and global level? Debates have already started questioning the effectiveness of such interventions, their fairness and equal distribution amongst tourism stakeholders ( Higgins-Desbiolles, 2020 ), their long-term impacts in terms of austerity and cuts of public expenditures. Future research looing into these issues is highly warrantied. In their CIVID-19 reactions and responses governments and destinations seem to have acted individually and nationalistic and recently selectively (e.g. bilateral and multilateral agreements amongst tourism bubbles). However, systems theory and crisis management, would argue that crises need to be addressed collectively. What would be the impact of such governmental behaviours on the future of tourism and destinations tourism policy making and strategies? As it seems, COVID-19 has raised political, geopolitical and governance issues that frameworks and concepts from these disciplines would need to be used to enlighten such research.

4. Conclusions: What is more and what is next

COVID-19 resulted in numerous socio-cultural, economic and psychological impacts on various tourism stakeholders, some of them for years to stay. Consequently, the pandemic has created a ‘fertile’ new context whereby tourism researchers can conduct research with valuable end-user benefits. However, COVID-19 tourism research should try to avoid the ‘publish or perish’ old mantra that has been driving and mushrooming tourism research ( Hall, 2011 ). Although studies conducting a reality check of impacts, predicting tourism demand, and benchmarking good and best practices are very useful and contextually interesting to assess COVID-19 impacts on various geographies sectors and stakeholders, they potentially offer limited scope to advance our knowledge on crisis management as well as to potentiate the pandemic’s affordance to reset our research agendas and expand the contribution and frontiers of tourism research and industry. It is the aim of this paper to inspire tourism scholars to view and use the COVID-19 as a transformational opportunity for reforming their mindsets in designing and conducting research and for the tourism institutions to reset their standards and metrics for motivating and evaluating the purpose, role and impact of tourism research. In addition, crises also accelerate technology innovation and change ( Colombo, Piva, Quas, & Rossi-Lamastra, 2016 ). However, these should not be viewed as inevitable, unquestionable and impossible to re-shape and re-adjust to serve real needs and meaningful values. It is the responsibility scholars to ensure that COVID-19 tourism research can ensure the latter.

The present analysis is not exhaustive in terms of the COVID-19 impacts, while impacts may not be uniform across all the actors of the same tourism stakeholder group. For example, the COVID-19 has different impacts on tourism operators based on their characteristics such as, the nature of the tourism sector (intermediaries, event organizers transportation, type of accommodation or attraction provider), their size, location, management and ownership style. Similarly, the highly heterogenous tourism demand (e.g. leisure and business travelers, group and independent tourists, special interest tourists such as religious, gay & lesbian, corporate travelers) also means that different COVID-19 impacts and implications are anticipated and worthy to be investigated for different market segments. COVID-19 tourism research should not only disclose such differentiated COVID-19 impacts, but it should also provide an enriched explanatory power about the roots of such disparities with the scope to envision and/or test any suggestions on how to address any inequalities and disadvantages that they may cause to various groups of tourism stakeholders. The analysis did not also include other major tourism stakeholders such as tourism employees, local communities, tourism entrepreneurs and tourism education (scholars, students and institutions alike). Recent developments and pressures faced by some of these tourism stakeholders were further strengthen by the COVID-19, which in turn place them in a more disadvantaged situation. COVID-19 research related to these stakeholders is equally important.

For example, COVID-19 has worsen the already difficult situation (e.g. high labour flexibility but at the expense of low salaries, lack of job security, insurance and other benefits) faced by an increasing number of tourism micro-entrepreneurs (e.g. food delivery people, ‘Uber taxi drivers’, “Airbnb hoteliers”) ( Sigala & Dolnicar, 2017 ). Algorithmic management, increased pressure and work stress are some of the negative impacts of the gig economy, which become more evident and fortified due to the COVID-19 (e.g. food delivery employees have no health insurance or coverage of lost salaries in case they get infected while working; ‘micro-hoteliers’ risk loosing their homes, as they cannot collect ‘accommodation fees’ to pay off home mortgages). Being an unofficial and sometime black economy/employment, gig tourism workers may not even be entitled to governmental subsidies provided to COVID-19 vulnerable employees or businesses. As the COVID-19 is expected to continue and reinforce contemporary paradigms and trends of this ‘causalisation’ of tourism employment (due to the upcoming economic recession and greater operating costs of tourism firms), COVID-19 tourism research needs to urgently investigate issues of employee psychological, mental and physical health, engagement, working conditions (e.g. remote working, virtual teams and virtual leadership) and other human resource issues within the COVID-19 setting. For example, traditional leadership, recruitment, management, and motivational incentives may not inspire, engage, motivate, and attract employees who have recalibrated their personal values and priorities during the COVID-19 lockdown and remote working.

The COVID-19 impacts on tourism employment create further pressures on tourism education that has severely affected by the pandemic. Apart from the virtualization of teaching and learning processes, tourism students and graduates have to also address the halt of industry interships, recruitment and questionable career paths. Tourism programs and universities are faced with reduced students’ intakes, industry and government sponsorship and research funding. Tourism researchers need to find new ways and sources for conducting research addressing social distancing, respecting the mental health and privacy issues of COVID-19 affected stakeholders. Investigating pedagogical issues such as how to make the design and delivery of tourism curricula more ‘resilient’, agile and updated to develop graduates with flexible and transferable skills to other industries is also equally important. For example, new online and offline courses and certifications have already emerged training graduates to become professional ‘contact tracer’ possessing the technical, emotional/social and ethical skills to manage customers and employees in situations of contact tracing, isolation, and quarantine (e.g. how contact tracing is done, how to build rapport with cases, identify their contacts, and support both cases and their contacts to stop transmission in their communities ( https://uh.edu/medicine/education/contact-tracer/ , https://www.coursera.org/learn/covid-19-contact-tracing?edocomorp=covid-19-contact-tracing , https://sph.uth.edu/news/story/trace ). However, is that just an opportunistic educational offering and/or a new ‘skill and qualification standard’ that tourism industry and demand would expect alike?

Many other specialized topics also warrant research within the domain of COVID-19. For example, the social entrepreneurship has been booming in tourism during the last decade ( Sigala, 2019 ) for several reasons including the 2008 economic recession. COVID-19 has boosted such tourism social ventures aiming to create social value, solve social problems created by the COVID-19 and provide help to people in need (e.g. marketplaces enabling the repurposing of various tourism unutilized resources such as labour, hotel and function space, food, cleaning material, e.g. HospitalityHelps.org ). The mushrooming of COVID-19 related tourism social ventures provides many opportunities to study and better understand this phenomenon within new and various ecosystems, stakeholders and circumstances.

Marianna Sigala is Professor at the University of South Australia and Director of the Centre for Tourism & Leisure Management. She is an international authority in the field of technological advances and applications in tourism with numerous awarded publications, research projects, keynote presentations in international conferences. In 2016, she has been awarded the prestigious EuroCHRIE Presidents’ Award for her lifetime contributions and achievements to tourism and hospitality education. She is the co-editor of the Journal of Service Theory & Practice, and the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Hospitality & Tourism Management. Professor Sigala was also appointed as CAUTHE Fellow in 2020.

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