Difficult times!!

The travel industry has taken a massive hit due to this corona virus attack. Time when travel industry was at its peak, many millennials were already taking out significant time of their schedules to travel and those not travelling, were saving to drop their jobs and get into businesses related to travel. Youth from hilly regions and tourist specific places had already left the conventional idea of working for others. They had set up their small businesses either alone or with their peers.

Now suddenly, all the travel has stopped, all kind of cash-flow to these businesses has ceased and has left the lockers empty and dry. The whole tourism value chain across hotels, travel agents, tour operations, destinations, restaurants, family entertainment venues and air, land and sea transportation have been hit.

Areas of travel and hospitality industry most severely impacted:

• Transport, Hotels and Travel firms:

Being the heart of Tourism industry, these services are severely affected. With spiraling losses, the firms are founding it hard to sustain. Most have gone for last resort to lay off employees and trying hard to survive the crash.

• Unorganized Sector:

Other than the organised sector, the tourism industry is a source of employment for homestays, small and budget hotel operators, tour guides and others for whom this is going to be an existential crisis that they can’t survive without support for more than a few months.

•  Roadside Eateries/Small Vendors

This often unconsidered or ignored section of the society is nothing less than a lifeline for every traveller. Remember the tea and maggie you had on your last visit to mountains? yes, we are talking about this section. A large population of tourist places (and their families of course) belongs to this unorganized sectors or indirectly contribute to it. They are taking a massive blow as these people are usually low on savings and rely on daily earnings for living.

• Concept of Hostels/ Shared Cabs/ Shared Rooms:

Over the past 3-4 years, the transport pooling was becoming a new common. Apart from being pocket friendly, it gave you an easily available and environment friendly alternative. But in the post-covid world, this is one field that is certainly going to get effected. As a passenger, you would be concerned about sharing the transport with a possible carrier. Similarly, would the owner of the transport would risk to open car to a stranger? Also, how comfortable would you be to share a room with strangers travelling from different areas.

• International Travel:

With most nations trying to cope up with the impacts of corona, the first step has been to up the fences against foreign travellers, with some even making 14 days quarantine periods compulsory and some suspending all the visas. It is not gonna be soon that countries would return back to the normal. And how many of travellers can actually afford to spend that much time to visit a country?

• Business travel:

Impacted by International travel, this is one area of travel which sees a large spending with companies spending dearly for its executives. It is gonna have a significant impact as lesser employees would be actually ready to do frequent business travel. Which in turn would hurt the airlines and top hotel chains.

• Clubs and Parties:

According to a study, millenials spend ~30% of their monthly earnings on clubbing, eating out in cafes, restaurants and partying. It would be interesting to find out how this is gonna shape in the post corona world. Social distancing and staying home for such long durations without meeting friends and family might also bring a behavioural shift. Increased virtual meetings would become a new way of life and further increase the importance of communication. Only time will tell how this field is going to take shape if the covid vaccine doesn’t arrive anytime soon.

• Economies dependent on tourism:

Many countries(eg-Thailand) and states(Himachal Pradesh) largely invested and dependent on tourism are going to be severely impacted and will have to find alternate ways for their population to survive in the near future.

Businesses are keenly trying to find ways to mitigate this crisis. Here are the few things already changing the landscape of tourism industry in the near future-

• The travel firms and airlines have laid off some of their staff and has significantly made deductions in salaries of majority of the employees.
  Similarly other cost cutting is being done to survive this economical disaster and to keep the company afloat.

• Businesses are coming up with innovative memberships and coupons. Many hostels/travel operators are offering discounted coupons and memberships with extended available time limit. This is helping them in 2 ways-
  • Ensure liquidity at present.
  • Travellers shall use their services whenever things get normal which not only ensure business when things reopen but also help them keep marketing expenses low and most importantly retain their loyal customer base. Collateral flow of cash in the form of meals/ other stuff is ensured when these services will be availed in future.

Yayavar recently conducted a poll which attracted more than 3500+ responses from frequent travellers and people interested in travelling. Read the responses made by travellers to self judge the situation-

Q1. When asked about how likely are you to travel in next 3 months, only 26% travellers chose highly likely option with over 62% travellers choosing to avoid travel in recent months.

Q2. When asked about what would be the choice of trip, Most people chose a short refreshing trip to mountains and beaches with less than 12% people planning a long trip in near future.

Q3. Quite defying the trend, when asked about the budget, more than 57% people willing to shell out 8000 bucks or more for a short trip (with hygienic services). This is an interesting change from pre-covid world when most travellers were willing to shell out somewhere around 6500-7000 for a short trip.

Q4. When asked about the preferred mode of transport, more than 58% travellers chose private vehicle as the preferred transport. Less than 42% people were comfortable with using public transport like buses, trains and flights for travel (compared to approx 85-90% in pre-covid era). This could be a big game changer for all the transport facilities and the future of public transportation.

Q5. When asked about the choice of hotel, more than 80% people are still interested to stay in normal hygienic homestays and hotels and would prefer them largely over 3-5 star hotel.

Q6. Another big change we noticed in the preferences was in the group size of the travel group. More than 90% people preferred a group size of 12 or lesser people and only 4% people are comfortable with group sizes exceeding 20 travellers. This is a huge change in preferences when mpre the merrier used to be the norm.

Despite of all the hardships brought to human race, this COVID-19 pandemic has certainly helped nature. The world is now a quieter place in these days of the lockdown. The air quality has improved . You must be well aware of the report that the air is so clean you can see the snow-capped Himalayas from Jalandhar, hundreds of kilometres away — something not seen in decades. Rivers are getting cleaner. So, the Earth is definitely healing and nature is reclaiming the Earth.