When coronavirus vaccines started being launched last year, there was a palpable sense of excitement. People started browsing travel websites and airlines were optimistic about flying again. Ryanair Holdings Plc even launched a “Jab & Go” campaign alongside images of young people in their 20s on vacation, with drinks in their hands.
It is not working that way.
To begin with, it is unclear whether vaccines really stop travelers from spreading the disease, even if they are less likely to get it. Nor are vaccines against the most infectious mutant strains that scared governments from Australia to the United Kingdom, causing them to close, rather than open, borders. An ambitious effort by operators for digital health passports to replace mandatory quarantines that kill the demand for travel is also fraught with challenges and has yet to conquer the World Health Organization.
This sad reality pushed expectations away from any significant recovery in global travel until 2022. This may be too late to save many airlines with only a few months of cash left. And the delay threatens to kill the careers of hundreds of thousands of pilots, crew and airport employees who have been out of work for almost a year. Instead of a return to global connectivity – one of the economic miracles of the jet era – prolonged international isolation seems inevitable.
“It is very important for people to understand that, at the moment, all we know about vaccines is that they will very effectively reduce the risk of serious diseases,” said Margaret Harris, WHO spokeswoman in Geneva. “We have not seen any evidence yet to indicate whether or not they interrupt transmission.”
To be sure, it is possible that a travel recovery will take place on your own – without the need for vaccine passports. If jabs start to reduce infection and mortality rates, governments can gain enough confidence to reverse quarantines and other border restrictions, and rely more on passengers’ Covid-19 tests before the flight.
The United Arab Emirates, for example, has largely eliminated entry restrictions, in addition to the need for a negative test. Although UK regulators have banned Ryanair’s “Jab & Go” ad as misleading, the head of discount airline Michael O’Leary still expects that almost the entire population of Europe will be vaccinated by the end of September. “This is the point at which we are released from these restrictions,” he said. “Short-distance travel will recover strongly and quickly.”
For now, however, governments remain wary of receiving international visitors and the rules change at the slightest sign of trouble. Witness Australia, which closed its borders with New Zealand last month after New Zealand reported a COVID-19 case in the community.
New Zealand and Australia, which have sought a successful approach to eliminating the virus, said their borders will not be fully opened this year. Meanwhile, travel bubbles, like the proposal between Asian financial centers in Singapore and Hong Kong, have not yet consolidated. France tightened international travel rules on Sunday, while Canada is preparing to impose tougher quarantine measures.
“Air traffic and aviation are really below the government’s priority list,” said Phil Seymour, president and chief consulting officer of IBA Group Ltd., a UK-based aviation services company. “It will be a long way out of this.”
The pace of vaccine distribution is another critical point.
Although the vaccination rate has improved in the United States – the largest air travel market in the world before the virus arrived – inoculation programs are far from the aviation panacea. In some places, they are just one more thing for people to discuss. Vaccine nationalism in Europe has dissolved into discussions about the supply and who should be protected first. The region is also divided over whether a jab should be a ticket for unrestricted travel.
All of this means that a recovery in passenger air traffic “is probably a 2022 thing,” according to Joshua Ng, director of Singapore-based Alton Aviation Consultancy. Long-distance travel may not resume properly until 2023 or 2024, he predicts. The International Air Transport Association said this week that, in the worst case, passenger traffic could improve just 13% this year. His official forecast of a 50% recovery was released in December.
American Airlines Group Inc. on Wednesday warned 13,000 employees that they could be fired, many of them for the second time in six months.
At the end of 2020, “we fully believed that we would have a summer schedule in which we would fly all of our planes and would need all the strength of our team,” CEO Doug Parker and President Robert Isom told workers. “Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.
The lack of progress is evident in the heavens. Commercial flights worldwide on February 1 reached less than half of pre-pandemic levels, according to OAG Aviation Worldwide Ltd. Services scheduled in major markets, including the UK, Brazil and Spain, are still falling, show the data.
Quarantines that trap passengers on arrival for weeks on end remain the biggest enemy of a real travel recovery. A better alternative, according to IATA, is a digital Travel Pass to store passenger vaccine and test histories, allowing restrictions to be lifted. Many of the world’s largest airlines have launched IATA and other applications, including Singapore Airlines Ltd., Emirates and British Airways.
“We need to work on as many options as possible,” said Richard Treeves, head of business resilience at British Airways. “We hope to integrate these applications and common standards.”
But even IATA recognizes that there is no guarantee that each state will adopt its Travel Pass immediately, if at all. There is currently no consensus on vaccine passports within the 27 members of the European Union, with countries dependent on tourism such as Greece and Portugal supporting the idea and larger members, including France, resisting.
“We will have a lack of harmony in the beginning,” said Nick Careen, IATA’s senior vice president for passenger affairs, at a news conference last month. “None of this is ideal.”
The airline group called on WHO to determine that it is safe for inoculated people to fly without quarantine in an attempt to reinforce the Travel Pass case. But the global health corps remains unmoved.
“At this point, all we can do is say, yes, you were vaccinated on this date with this vaccine and received your booster – if it is a two-stroke vaccine – on this date,” said Harris of WHO. “We are working hard to have a secure electronic system for people to have this information. But at this point, that’s it. It’s a record. “
A vaccine passport would not be able to demonstrate the quality or durability of any protective immunity obtained by being inoculated, or by being infected with viruses naturally, Harris said.
“The idea that your natural immunity should be protective and that you could somehow use that as a way of saying ‘I’m fine to travel’ is completely out of date.