Covid-19 Aftermath: Top Travel Trends for 2021

Enough has been said and enough has been written about how bad the travel and tourism industry had it during the Covid-19 situation. A pandemic we all are still fighting collectively continues to stall our plans of starting new businesses, venturing out into our holiday plans and doing more in the year 2020.

Apart from the fear that the entire contagion has brought in, what it has caused is also closed frontiers for traveling, shut several hotels and restaurants as they went bankrupt, stalled the economies of several countries making them immovable for a solid couple of years and more.

But this post is not going to be about the bad angles to the travel and tourism sector because of the viral disease but the brighter side of it in the coming months and weeks. Before reading about this, you could also get an idea of how bad of an impact the industry had in this write up here.

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This will give you an idea of what accommodation service providers, airlines, cruise, restaurants and other tourism-associated places went through in the last couple of months. And in this post, we will understand the new-born mentality and attitude in people’s minds with respect to traveling.

So, let’s get started.

The concept of road trips is a niche of its own. There are those who prefer air travel and foreign destinations, there are those who prefer sailing, and then there are those who put their bags in their cars and drive down to their preferred destinations.

With several countries lifting travel bans and lockdown restrictions, the new normal will involve people preferring shorter road trips at least for a year to destinations near them. People are still hesitant to step out for the fear of coming into contact with people and contracting the disease. For any other mode of travel, they’ll have to go through processes and be prone to environments that are vulnerable to the virus.

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However, that’s not the case with road trips. It involves you, your sanitized car and your friends (who test negative). The risks are significantly low as you encounter less people and public spaces.

For those of you who didn’t know, road trips are already one of the preferred vacations in the USA with close to 22% of the tourists going on road trips in 2016. Besides, 53% of the people in the US are also packing their bags for road trips this year. If you think you’re bit by the travel bug and want to venture on a road trip,

Here are the top 5 routes you could take –

Ten countries including Switzerland, Greece, Egypt, Vietnam and more have already started welcoming tourists from all over the world. If there are sceptics on one side, there are also adventure enthusiasts on the other side of the spectrum, willing to risk it all to satisfy their wanderlust.

With the influx of such people, what will get a boost is travel insurance. Though several countries do require valid travel insurance for visa purposes, some countries have been lenient. However, the new normal will only make the requirement of having travel insurance a mandatory travel document from now on.

Before the pandemic, around 20% of the travellers opted for travel insurance for their vacations. However, new studies reveal that close to 45% of the travellers will prefer a travel insurance policy going forward.

Domestic travel will get a boost across the world. This is propelled by two major reasons –

Until vaccinations arrive, the spreading of the disease is curtailed due to herd immunity or other such health instances, we can be sure that people would explore places within their country they haven’t explored before.

This increases local tourism and gives them much needed boost in terms of revenue, support and patronage. Several local vendors, restaurant owners, hotels and more will get visibility they deserve and local tourism will help such owners resurrect their businesses.

Destinations which have been long eclipsed by their prominent counterparts will get a significant boost in their visibility and arrival of tourists. This is because a majority of travellers will be looking to head to places of less popularity for the fact that there would be less people and crowd.

Such intentions will open up the avenues for diverse lesser-known destinations across the world including quaint archipelagos, hill stations, wildlife parks, valleys, remote villages and more.

To get an idea of how this works, imaging people preferring a destination like Chiang Mai instead of Bangkok or Pattaya whenever Thailand tourism comes into your visual. Every region has a range of places that are stereotyped and made popular and those that are equally beautiful but less known. Such destinations will witness a higher influx of tourists from now.

This is perhaps the most important trend that will catch up soon among travellers and travel agents. Now that the world has witnessed the concept of uncertainty in the world, they would be prepared to deal with such instances better. This will pave the way for flexible ticket booking across all tourism sectors like airlines, hotels and accommodations, amusement parks, places of interests and more.

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Flexible ticket booking means that you would be able to hold a valid ticket and make last-minute changes to your travel dates or destinations without paying a penalty. This also includes cancellations. Soon, we can expect reforms in booking policies from travel agents, airlines and other sectors.

Travel mobile app developers, people in travel app development and those working on travel software solutions across the world would also roll out updates to their websites, apps and point-of-sale systems.

By new normal, we mean the mandate of wearing face masks, carrying hand sanitizers and conducting temperature checks at frequent intervals. Social distancing, too, is an integral part of the new normal protocols.

Close to 56% of the destinations across the world have made social distancing compulsory in their premises and 50% of the places have also made wearing masks mandatory. As more frontiers open up and travel restrictions are lifted, this new normal could be a benchmark in travel and tourism operations to ensure the safety and security of travellers.

Going forward, we could also expect automation in surveillance of these mandates with travel management software solutions taking care of the requirements.

Apart from these, we also anticipate a decrease in pilgrimage considering the age group that partakes such activities. We also forecast reduced group traveling because of social distancing and volume of visitors protocols.

The Covid-19 situation has brought out several crucial aspects of traveling to the limelight. It’s time we learn from this, pick ourselves up, adapt to updated requirements and surge ahead in the coming years.

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This is our shape of travel and tourism 2.0. What are your thoughts?

And if you intend to make use of this time and launch a travel software solution, get in touch with an ideal travel app development company like ours today.