International travel could be stalled for years.

Today, I listened to an half-hour interview with Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta. He said domestic flights would return this year, international next year. He, too, reminded us that other countries are not receiving vaccine at the same rate.

Most of that article was behind a pay wall, so I couldn't read it all. What I did read, I'll take with a grain of salt. I think anyone who thought fhat travel would be back at prepandemic levels this year must have been indulging on a bit too much happy juice. But as I've said before, and will say again, it's not a binary (all or nothing) situation.

Yes, some countries may have to remain closed off for another year, or even two. But SOME countries will likely be able to begin travelling to SOME other countries by later in the year. It will be gradual, just as the vaccination rollout and the drop in active cases will be gradual. Anyone insisting on the possibility of a rapid return to prepandemic life is kidding themselves. But it's not all doom and gloom, either. JMHO.

The sky is falling.

We will see travel opening up internationally by the second half of this year. Not everywhere, of course, but you don't need to hide in your basement.

Will international be stalled for years? Maybe it will, maybe it won't--I don't know.

Who does know? I can answer that--absolutely no one.

Did Ed say anything about how Delta's going to pay back the $10.8 Billion dollars they've received in the last 10 months?

I certainly hope that everybody, everywhere, gets inoculated as soon as absolutely possible, and that that’s extremely soon. Elitist and dismissive that this may sound (and maybe be), first world destinations will certainly be getting vaccinations sooner than dispersed third or fourth world sites. That’s where a lot of us - certainly tourists aiming for destinations that Rick Steves covers - are aiming. Those places will likely be open to visitors before much, much longer.

Rick himself, on tonight’s video presentation, said that we’d certainly be traveling within the next year, and that sights will be crowded when things are fully open. Maybe that won’t be immediate, and the “stall” factor may mean that things aren’t up to full speed immediately, but I don’t see the restoration of travel taking years, WSJ notwithstanding.

Having said all that, 14 months ago we were visualizing a safari tour in Africa in early 2021. Just before putting down a substantial downpayment, the pandemic broke out. So we didn’t endure a protracted refund process, and Africa is down the road ... WAY down. Hopefully the lions, rhinos, and gazelles are holding down the fort. Hopefully people are getting thru this, and we do as well. Time is ticking, and it would be really good if the Closing Bell doesn’t ring too soon. In the meantime, first-world Europe will be a welcome destination, with arrivals later this year.

I don't waste my time on predictions.

I also don’t like to make predictions, especially about the future.

I think CJean nailed it.

Cyn

I certainly hope that everybody, everywhere, gets inoculated as soon
as absolutely possible, and that that’s extremely soon. Elitist and
dismissive that this may sound (and maybe be), first world
destinations will certainly be getting vaccinations sooner than
dispersed third or fourth world sites. That’s where a lot of us -
certainly tourists aiming for destinations that Rick Steves covers -
are aiming. Those places will likely be open to visitors before much,
much longer.

The logic sounds solid. But there is another way to look at it. I read an interview with the head of finances for Montenegro. I think Montenegro would fall into your "third or fourth world sites". He explained a situation where vaccines weren't coming anytime soon, so keeping things closed until they do come would doom an economy already devastated by the COVID tourism closure. For context, this is a country where 25 to 30% of the economy comes from tourism and the number of tourists each year are 3 x the total population of the country. No surprise that they are currently open and welcoming tourists. That is probably behind why Albania, Bosnia & Herzegovina, N. Macedonia, and a few others.

My suspicion is that the most developed countries of the EU might be the last to open. They have the economic clout to hold out the longest. But I suspect if they do, countries like Spain and Portugal and Greece will break away on the issue.

Okay, just wild speculation. It will be interesting to see who guessed it correctly. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/91/52/f4/9152f47ec524b2c7f0bf0c218834be6d.jpg

It remains, that when things are open, they will be open. Until then, they are not open.

Are you ok with a vaccine that is 60-70% effective against the variants? If so, go for it live your life. I, myself, am not worried about getting infected/dying, but my fear is I'll infect someone older than me and kill them. This virus isn't anything new, everyone knows the risks and if you decide to travel its your decision and you have to be ok with the risks. So, if England opens up to Americans this summer, I'm going to have to go have Strawberries & Cream at Wimbledon!!!

....So, if England opens up to Americans this summer, I'm going to have to go have Strawberries & Cream at Wimbledon!!!...."

I'm afraid you'll be out of luck. Wimbledon has already confirmed that it won't be opening up the tournament to spectators this year irrespective of how the situation pans out.

"It remains, that when things are open, they will be open. Until then, they are not open."
Could not have set it better

We are doing our first post-vaccine trip today. Not going to Paris, just Charleston,SC.

I've always done my best to avoid and disregard fortune tellers and other charlatans - sadly, that now means I disregard nearly everything I read in the media. As though predictions from "experts" (often anonymous ones) were news! And down the road, no matter how wrong they were before, they are seldom held to account for their wild and irresponsible musings. All kinds of trash can get published these days.

All I know is that in my world, folks everywhere are getting totally fed-up. Students want to study. Business owners what their businesses back. And travelers want to travel. Travel money has bubbled up like lava and poured into the RV and campground industries.

"The RV Industry Association's December 2020 survey of manufacturers found that total RV shipments finished the month with 40,382 units, an increase of 46.8% from the 27,516 units shipped in December 2019, representing the best December on comparable record."

RV lots around here have been near-empty for many months... a big surprise to me considering the price tag and the weak return on investment with RV's. I suspect many of these new buyers didn't really want an RV - they are just frustrated air-travelers (with an emphasis on the "traveler" part) who will sell their rigs and buy their air vacations just as soon as the Covid travel restrictions weaken.

And I think that will happen sooner rather than later. Unlike the RV industry, many other industries in countries around the planet are suffering very badly, which, along with strained government cash reserves - and overworked currency-printers - is putting a lot of pressure on leaders everywhere to ease restrictions.

Travel money has bubbled up like lava and poured into the RV and
campground industries.

People had to be flexible, and other (perhaps overlooked or spurned) parts of the travel industry benefitted. It doesn't sound bad to go out of your comfort zone and try something else - you may end up liking it.

I don't disagree, Agnes.

My point was that if they had preferred RV travel in the first place, many of those buyers would have bought them in previous years - not in this period of general economic difficulty.

Regarding places going out of business because of the pandemic: its the nature of capitalism that new places (supply) will appear, to meet the needs of travelers (demand), as they return. And I hope RS is already working on across-the-board re-writes.

While WSJ articles on travel like the above are interesting and of better quality than most mainstream news sources, its still just a collection of opinions and projections based on opinions. But more importantly, the general focus of the WSJ is looking at big picture business trends, for investment purposes, and so their measure of a successful outcome from the pandemic is based on profitability and employment across the whole travel industry as a sector of the business economy. That is, they are more interested in Marriott's quarterly reports, and potential major airline bankruptcies, than the lines to get in museums. As an individual traveler, I don't care what the big trend is, as long as I can travel to where I want to go.

steveh3011, while I stand by my words (above), my April trip to Europe will be fully booked by the end of this week. 🥳🥳🥳🥳

I may have a way to make this vaccine business run better than leaving it to the government....

Have Ticketmaster be responsible for appointment times and let Amazon distribute the vaccine. Both are effecient at each respectively.

It's a start: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-announce-us-donate-billion-covid-19-vaccines/story?id=75978762

At least one jurisdiction in the US (don't remember where) did use a commercial ticketing website (not TicketMaster), at least initially. News reports indicated it did not go well. I don't know whether things got smoothed out later.

Ticketmaster! So bots can reserve vaccine slots and sell them.

No one want's to be the "Grumb." Yet, I don't see any sort of normal travel till, 2023. 2021 will be the year that thinking people will get the Vac. However, 20% of the US population don't want to get the Vac. Why? Well 20% of the US population are idiots and think the world is only 6,000 years old and that the entire pandemic is some sort of conspiracy. And this why we will be at the back of any line, to international travel. :(

What is normal travel?

I was pretty bullish on travel to Europe this summer. Until their vaccine rollout tanked and their Covid numbers started trending back up. That and the lack of ANY sort of word saying yay or nay as far as Americans go from TPTB have made me super reliant on third party articles that may or may not have have any validity. (I am not implying this should be their first priority) At any rate, I am giving it until Easter and then I'm pulling the plug if it's not clear. I think that has more to do with me being emotionally ready to cancel than any likelihood Italy will be happening for me this summer.

Time to travel will happen when it happens. Predictions of when that will happen are worthless until we decide it is time.

Time to travel will happen when it happens. Predictions of when that
will happen are worthless until we decide it is time.

Very true.

April 17th you will find me here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJDpi0kkHqM

Touristic businesses disappearing is less of an issue on richer European countries where the local population is wealthier than the average tourist. Countries like Switzerland, Italy and Norway registered an uptick of domestic demand for tourist sites, restaurants and the like, as internal travel restrictions are reduced but international travel, even within Europe, is still fraught with quarantine mandates, or hotel isolation periods.

So you end up with a lot of people with some money unspent on SE Asia, Caribean or Greek island vacations going around a bit in their own countries.

The situation will be direr for the Balkans, for instance, or for budget accommodations and "things-only-foreigners-would-really-like". For these businesses, one year with limited or no tourist travel has been really catastrophic. An upside is that this will allow some reconfiguration of businesses in old city centers that some would complain about having been dominated by high-volume low-price activities like souvenir shops, "free" [or: highly exploitative] walking tours, bar/pub crawls etc.

Nightlife of all type has also been severely damaged, although it is something easier to put back in place once things go back to normal.

Other businesses are surviving as they can; many hotels went into a "long-stay mode" offering rooms for students with meals on their restaurant.

Given the opinions on this thread, I seem to be an optimistic. It seems that each day the vaccine news becomes more encouraging. Admittedly, the European countries have been far too passive in the vaccination process compared to the US and the UK. But I remain hopeful that by the last quarter of this year life will be much closer to February 2020 than February 2021.

Richard, I'm an optimist too.

Mark, glad you finally made it to Houston! Just in time for all the fun last week!

Stalled for years?

No.

I'll type slower. N.... O.

As humans we always make predictions about the future, like on a daily basis. It's what makes us human. Your dog isn't predicting the future, or even cognizant a future exists.

Travelmom, that was fun. I was among the fortunate with rolling blackouts. 15 min on, 45 min off, repeat. 3 days. But it was enough to keep the house at 50F.

Sadly Norwegian Air will no longer fly from the USA-

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/norwegian-air-shuttle-ends-all-us-flights/amp

https://www.businessinsider.com/norwegian-air-cheap-flights-us-europe-cuts-long-haul-2021-1?amp

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgoldstein/2021/01/14/norwegian-airlines-ends-low-cost-long-haul-international-flights/amp/

Not sure what an optimistic is, but like James, I am an optimist too. Seriously, the vaccine news on nearly all fronts is very encouraging. The vaccination rates are clearly increasing because of greater availability, the Johnson & Johnson one-shot vaccine should be approved in the next two days, and it now seems based on the data we have that the vaccines reduce transmission as well as provide immmunity. I recognize there are the variants. But I think that at the moment our public-health authorities are being exceedingly conservative in their public pronouncements to avoid raising expectations, and to encourage people to keep wearing masks and maintain social distance. For what it is worth (probably little), I think we are now seeing the beginning of the end. There will be bumps in the road, but the vaccines are proving to be a true gamechanger.

The following isn't optimism, it's science

A bit of back-of-the-envelope math shows why this period of declining hospitalizations should keep going. Let’s assume the CDC is correct that about 25 percent of adults have COVID-19 antibodies from a previous infection. Let’s add to that number the 10 percent of adults who have received vaccine shots since December, assuming an overlap of 3 percent. That would mean one-third of adults currently have some sort of protection, either from a previous infection or from a vaccine. At our current vaccination pace, we’re adding about 10 million people to this “protected” population every week. We’re accelerating toward a moment, sometime this spring, when half of American adults should have some kind of coronavirus protection. And we should be particularly optimistic about severe illness among older Americans, since the vaccines are disproportionately going to people over 50, who have accounted for 70 percent of all hospitalizations.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/why-covid-19-cases-are-falling-so-fast/618041/

Here is a website that I found interesting. It is tracking conditions in the EU: https://reopen.europa.eu/en

My suspicion is that nations with large tourism industries may jump at the chance to host large numbers of Americans who've been vaccinated. Given the success they're experiencing with vaccinations, I would expect Israel to open up soon to vaccinated tourists.

There is good news, and not so good news. But this doesn't surprise me. I mentioned in another post that Orban pretty much marches to his own drummer.

https://hungarymatters.hu/2021/02/26/orban-flags-stricter-travel-rules/

ORBÁN FLAGS STRICTER TRAVEL RULES
February 26, 2021
Hungary's borders must be tightened and stricter travel rules introduced in light of the big escalation of the coronavirus epidemic, Viktor Orbán said in an interview to public radio.
Even business people must understand that viral variants must be radically curbed, even for business trips beyond Europe’s borders, the prime minister said, adding that many people were planning trips to “exotic destinations” which were getting more affordable in the current circumstances, noting that some of the more infectious virus mutations were from Africa. Orbán also noted that the operative body responsible for handling the epidemic ordered hospitals to ramp up their level of preparedness at its meeting this morning, and this level would be the same as during the critical phases of the epidemic in April and November last year. During the past 24 hours, 4,668 new infections were reported, he said, and the number of infections is expected to increase drastically in the weeks ahead, putting an increased burden on the health-care system, Orbán added.
Orbán warned that in the third wave of the epidemic many tens of thousands could lose their jobs. He noted that 55,000 fewer people have a job than a year ago, adding that at least as many jobs must be created in the coming months.

There is bad news, and there is good news:
https://news.gtp.gr/2021/02/26/only-coordinated-travel-measures-can-save-summer-2021-say-aviation-bodies/

Ahead of the March 1 extraordinary meeting of the EU’s tourism ministers, 15 European stakeholders in aviation and tourism are urging the Portuguese Presidency of the EU to put efforts into the coordination of all restrictive measures related to Covid-19.
In an open letter, industry and worker associations affirm the presidency’s motto: ‘time to deliver: a fair, green and digital recovery’, and outline the different actions that would revive the sector, enabling the restart of international travel as soon as it is safe to do so.
The group asserts that coordination is required on travel restrictions, vaccination certificates, and testing requirements, all of which continue to negatively affect both tourism and aviation.
The associations call for EU harmonization on the following matters:

• Widespread use of affordable, reliable and rapid tests to ease current travel restrictions.
• Termination of quarantine requirements for air travelers that have already tested negative.
• Clarity on the timing, languages, and exemptions to Covid-19 tests which remains unclear.
• Exemption of vaccinated travelers from testing, quarantine, and other restrictions.
• Use of vaccinations (certificate) not as a pre-requisite to travel, but to assist in the restart of air travel.*

EU says all on board for vax passports but I thought the courts ruled against compulsory vax? I guess compulsory might be re-defined as-we won't make you get the jab but if you want to travel, work, shop, live etc you better get the shot. Grateful for the time we were able to get in Europe but alas I think European travel for my family is finished.

Thanks again James for your informative posts.

I am optimistic as well. The USA is well ahead of the EU with vaccinations, but the process is well underway in both.

I wonder if some countries will open the door if you have the vaccine. Some cruise lines are requiring a vaccine and a negative test.

Here is the current vaccination data for Spain, including all of our regional efforts (In Spanish) - https://elpais.com/sociedad/2021-02-20/asi-evoluciona-la-vacunacion-contra-la-covid-en-espana-y-en-el-mundo.html

Spain has 2,6% of the population vaccinated and is slightly ahead of France, Germany, and Italy, but overall the EU member states seem to have the same vaccination rates. Interestingly, Australia and New Zealand have barely vaccinated anyone.

International Travel will expand significantly in 2021. Will it be like 2019? No. 2020? Of course not.

Keep your options open. I'm not writing off 2021.

I mean, hell, travel could be stalled by a volcanic eruption. If you live with that mindset, well, God bless you.

We've been traveling internationally since 1970. We're used to going to Europe 1-2 times per year.

I don't know about you, but it's downright boring hanging around the house month after month.

We've also been on who knows how many cruises, and have been to virtually every island in the Caribbean. When working, I too traveled domestically all over the country. In retirement, we have no interest in visiting U.S. cities.

So until Europe opens up enough, we'll just do the repairs to our houses and dig in the dirt (landscaping.)

We are holding out hope upon hope for our mid Oct cruise out of Venice....Smaller cruise ships. All quite iffy I know!!! We have refundable deposits at this point. We’ll see what 6-7 mths look like for our European “friends”! We all need each other!

But very grateful our US has National Park systems! They are a jewel! We are taking fam vaca to Glacier, Yellowstone and Tetons early Aug. Will be crazy crowded but we have had in the park lodging reservations from the get-go!
We also have a never ending love of Europe! But oh our US has so much to offer when maybe our overseas travels cannot yet happen!