Global travel unlikely to fully recover until 2024

Contrary to the wider-held belief that 2022 would be the recovery year for travel and tourism sector, a survey by the World Economic Forum (WEF) revealed that the sector will not witness a full recovery until 2024.
The WEF survey, conducted in collaboration with Statista, which took into account the views from the UNWTO Panel of Experts, found that the majority of the survey respondents were confident of an uptick in travel activity this year. Just 4 percent of the surveyed experts expect a full recovery in 2022. 
“Roughly one-third of respondents believe that international arrivals will return to pre-pandemic levels in 2023, while 63 percent think it will take even longer than that,” the survey findings said. 
About one-third of respondents believe international arrivals will return to pre-pandemic levels in 2023, while 63 percent think it will take even longer than that. 

The UNWTO scenarios predict international tourist arrivals could grow between 30 and 78 percent in 2022, compared to 2021. However, it would still be more than 50 percent below pre-pandemic levels. 
Meanwhile, to increase air travel, the IATA has urged governments to make air travel as hassle free as possible. 
Some of the measures proposed include: relaxed entry criteria for fully vaccinated passengers, enabling quarantine-free travel for non-vaccinated travellers with a negative pre-departure antigen test result and removing other travel bans and restrictions. 
“While international travel remains far from normal in many parts of the world, there is momentum in the right direction. Governments should focus on building population immunity and stop placing travel barriers in the way of a return to normality,” IATA Director General Willie Walsh said in a statement recently.
Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, the global tourism sector saw almost uninterrupted growth for decades.
Since 1980, the number of international arrivals skyrocketed from 277 million to nearly 1.5 billion in 2019. 
Data from the UNWTO show that the two largest crises of the past decades, the SARS epidemic of 2003 and the global financial crisis of 2009 were minor bumps in the road compared to the COVID-19 pandemic.