According to Andy Haldane, Chief Economist at the Bank of England, “the UK economy is like a coiled spring, ready to release large amounts of pent-up financial energy”. 

Deliberate Plans to Spend Accidental Savings

 

Despite the devastating economic impact and inequalities that have been exacerbated by COVID-19, there will be people in work, retired, and with cash to spend from ‘accidental’ savings during lockdown. Having saved on commuting, childcare, eating out, travel, and other indulgences, travel will be the single biggest beneficiary of spending after we come out of lockdown, according to research by the Trajectory Partnership.

The star of the tourism firmament in between lockdowns in 2020, domestic holidays will again prove the most resilient sector in 2021.

 

Try booking a half-decent self-catering cottage or an AirBnB anywhere in Britain for the rest of the year and you’ll spend a long time searching. Bookings have been flooding in since the UK government’s ‘data not dates’ announcement outlined a list of dates for gradually letting us off the lead. Interestingly, recent research into Scots’ tourism intentions by 56 Degree Insight showed a swing of +25% in favour of self-catering, perhaps indicating the value people attach to both independence and safety in forthcoming holidays.

Outdoors is the new ‘cool’. After getting a taste for the delights of the countryside, partly from a craving for space to enable comfortable social distancing and partly from a concern to escape the type of crowds cities make it hard to avoid, will people return to shopping malls when they can? Probably not in pre-pandemic numbers.

 

Slow is the new synonym for engagement and empathy. Having discovered space in rural destinations, it seems likely people will tune into these places, slow their pace of exploration, and seek fulfilment in local experiences, from regional cuisine to local traditions and culture, which make the place what it is, and spend longer in it.

Safety will remain a concern for months to come. Travellers will want to know their intended destination, means of transport, accommodation, and places they might visit, all take visitor safety seriously. While hygiene and safety measures may not be a competitive advantage, they will almost certainly be a competitive disadvantage if places don’t apply them assiduously and communicate this effectively to potential visitors.

Partly as a result of pent-up demand and partly ‘accidental savings’, many people will be willing to spend more on their holidays. They may have to, as the pressure of demand, particularly for scarcer accommodation, pushes prices up.

 

Tour operators are reporting a greater willingness amongst customers to pay for upgrades, particularly for accommodation, and to buy more add-ons to ensure they get the best slot, sea view, or just guaranteed access to an iconic attraction. You don’t want to spend a fortune on travelling half the length of the country only to find Stonehenge is fully booked or there’s no space on the dolphin-watching boat until the week after you leave. 

Well, not just siblings – the whole family. Global crises have an effect of bringing families together. For many, who haven’t seen their parents, children, grandchildren, and other family members for the best part of a year, the desire to get together will be powerful. This is likely to translate into multi-generational family holidays, just to see each other again. Missed Christmas gatherings will be re-enacted all over the country.

 

We saw a growth in family and multi-generational holidays after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the USA. A combination of shock and sadness at the number of lives lost, which brings the fragility of existence dramatically home, plus such a long stretch without seeing each other, will surely fuel this desire to get together in places beyond the home.

 

• Concern for safety: No-one wants to touch anything. This will manifest itself in increasingly contactless and cashless transactions and personally accessible information, from hotel check-in and checkout, transport tickets, and retail purchases, to food-ordering, automatic doors, and all manner of information. People will increasingly expect this all to be accessible on the move 24/7– via mobile platforms, with no business or institutional hurdle between them and the service.

• Currency and relevance: Big brother-style big data enables quite precise insights into people’s preferences, locations, and behaviour. People will expect all information to be bang up to date, personally relevant, and local. This will be a two-way process. Visitors might search for places to eat nearby that have availability in an hour. But a vegan restaurant might also push its availability to any vegans within a 1-hour radius. The opportunities for clever destination management and filling trough periods for businesses are extensive.

• Fear of missing out (FOMO): No-one wants to miss out on holiday fun. The anticipated boom in domestic travel and probable ongoing need for social distancing are likely to increase visitor pressure on certain places and certain businesses at certain times. On the one hand, this is likely to encourage advance booking, to be sure of not missing out. On the other, clever apps should provide information on busy and quieter times to empower visitors to make informed choices about where to go when. This will reduce frustration and queuing and help visitors have a more fulfilling holiday by removing uncertainty and giving them some of their time back.

• The way of the world: The world is wired. For all these reasons, and because the younger you are the more you expect to have the world at your fingertips, technological solutions to every material desire will be expected. That’s just the way of the world. If you can’t find the information you want, book where you want to go, arrange deliveries, pay for them, and communicate with the people you want, from your mobile phone, they won’t exist, at least in the millennial and Gen Z consciousness. 

Just as Charles Darwin could never have imagined space travel, expect advances we can’t even dream of today, which will make life easier, everything more do-able, and place control in our hands. The rate of technological change has always been exponential. The pandemic has accelerated this, as we’ve found ways to overcome enforced physical remoteness through virtual means of communication, working, service delivery, entertainment, and education.

Technology will shrink space and shorten time. And it will do all this from the phone in your pocket.

Are these current trends just flashes in the pan, a reaction to months of lockdown, which will dissipate after people have drunk from the Pierian spring of ‘revenge travel’?

 

Will we continue to find pleasure in small things, pass by more slowly, and soak up the atmosphere of places? Or will we revert to our more frenetic, pre-pandemic, patterns of consumptive behaviour, in which the default is a desire to be entertained rather than entertain ourselves? And will the associated concern for our impact on the environment and local communities last only as long as no-frills airlines remain grounded? 

 

Amid the euphoria engendered by the prospect of mass vaccination in some countries, lies a concern over limited access to vaccination in others. Variable vaccination rates worldwide will delay suppression of the virus in unvaccinated populations. It will also heighten the risk of mutation and new, vaccine-proof strains emerging.

 

This raises the issue of travellers returning home with new variants to initiate a new cycle of infection, which would almost certainly result in the imposition of further lockdown and other measures to contain these new variants.

 

As epidemiologists and politicians worldwide have so clearly declared, ‘no-one is safe until everyone is safe’. The current supply shortages and associated vaccine nationalism do not bode well either for the number of shots needed worldwide or for international cooperation, at least in the short-medium term. So, we should perhaps expect delays.

 

We are likely to face a two-speed economy in the UK after the end of the Job Retention Scheme: a greater divergence than before between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. Inequalities will be even more polarised as many return to work, but others are laid off as businesses are unable to reopen or reduce their staff.

 

The hospitality industry has been one of the hardest hit during the pandemic. It has become illegal to indulge in the two things that are critical to the tourism and hospitality sector: travel, and spending time with others. It’s as if you sheared the wings of airplanes and still expected them to fly. Nothing could be more detrimental to the tourism industry than restricting travel. You can’t take delivery of a holiday via Amazon.

 

We may still be far from the sunlit uplands of full recovery. But, with the clouds of the pandemic beginning to clear, we can start to see the road that leads towards that horizon.

 

There are still likely to be potholes along the road, as we face perhaps a resurgence of infection, new variants, and a consequent, temporary reimposition of constraints on our leisure activities. But the science is on our side, the tourism industry knows what to do, and the consumer appetite is there to be unleashed whenever it is safe and permissible to travel.

 

• We will have to learn to live with this virus.
• We will need to work hard to make the whole world safe because, until then, none of us are safe.

Recovery may take time. But vaccines, political will, global cooperation, human ingenuity, and a worldwide love of travel, are the ingredients that should, together, inspire confidence and, eventually, help tourism bounce back. There is no reverse gear to this recovery. It may just take a year or so to reach top gear. In the meantime, there is hope for the medium-long-term.

 

And we can look forward to hugs and home-based holidays in the short-medium-term.

......………….Here’s to hitting the road again, and happy hugging.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(March 2021)