There has been much criticism both ways of world and UK policy towards international travel. All those who like travel or need to travel across frontiers have been very critical of the big hit airline travel has taken, as many countries have closed their borders or greatly restricted flying. Meanwhile many others have been very critical of countries including the UK who have not closed enough air borders quickly enough with signs that a major source of infection could come from overseas, as CV 19 did originally from China. Surely people ask, isn’t a quick and full close down of air and shipping routes the best way of stopping spread, and wouldn’t such a lockdown allow much less internal damage through internal closures?
We have ended up globally with a prolonged closure of much of the international travel system. It has not proved possible to reach global agreement, so sometimes your country allows you to travel to another but the other country does not want you to, or vice versa. Rules change rapidly and often, making it a very unappetising idea to go on a foreign holiday as you may get stranded there, or you may be forced into a long sojourn at your expense in a non holiday hotel in your return. All this implies that maybe being tough on global travel for any individual country is sensible, as travel patterns will be disrupted anyway by other countries and most of the new virus strains originate elsewhere and need to travel to your country.
In order to save the rest of the hospitality and travel sector the market did need to adjust to the idea that this year many more UK people would take holidays in the UK and foreign visitors would not. The industry needed to show flexibility to offer sufficiently attractive UK holidays to locals to replace the type of tourism they sold to foreign visitors.I wish the UK industry well in serving the many UK holidaymakers keen to have a domestic holiday. Maybe it will win more people over to UK holidays in future.
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