Travel and tourism in the U.S. and in many parts of the world is in crisis. Many travel and hospitality-related businesses are struggling to build a sustained recovery, still reeling from a collapse in travel and local business. An estimated 100 million+ jobs have been lost in tourism globally and in the U.S., an estimated 38% of all jobs lost in the nation are tourism-related. U.S. travel has named it the "Great Travel Depression".
Tourism’s successful restart and recovery is critical to wider economic and social recovery of local communities, local economies and job markets. Both in the U.S. and globally, there is no recovery without tourism at its center.
Here are eight essential steps to a successful restart and recovery in tourism. Our recovery strategy needs to be urgent, well-resourced, and integrated, tackling each of these areas.
1. Managing the Health Crisis.
The Great Travel Depression is fundamentally a health crisis. The recovery of tourism starts and ends with getting on top of the pandemic. This will take aggressive city, state/province and national action across the three fundamentals of managing the pandemic: i. limiting transmission through social distancing and other social behaviors, ii. exhaustive testing to find new cases and iii. rigorous tracking and tracing to discover new or at risk cases and isolate. In each of these areas, the U.S. and other countries such as Brazil are simply failing. Badly. In stark comparison, the European Union has made substantive progress illustrated below. This is the result of coordinated, committed nationwide efforts which are creating opportunities for tourism recovery not currently available in the U.S.
