Will international travel return in 2021? What we know now

(CNN) – There is hope: summer holidays abroad can take place in style this year.

Vaccines and tests are the way to go, say Charles and other industry experts, but what is needed, perhaps so desperately, is greater consistency and coordination across borders.

“When you don’t have a globally coordinated approach, it’s very difficult for the industry to progress, especially when you have the rules of the game basically changing every day,” said Luis Felipe de Oliveira, director general of the International Airport Council (ACI) , a global commercial organization representing world airports.

There is much more work to be done to define testing protocols that would allow global travelers to choose not to be quarantined and to find ways to share vaccination and testing information uniformly and safely across borders.

Sovereign nations still decide what is best for them individually, looking at their own health and economies, but progress has been made to make countries look more globally at the enormous economic strength that is travel.

ACI’s Oliveira says the summer’s recovery could mean that international air traffic reaches 50% to 60% of previous levels in most countries.

Here are some of the obstacles that travelers and industry will need to overcome as travel increases:

Eliminating quarantines

Mandatory – and mobile – quarantine requirements “are basically killing the process of restarting the industry,” said Oliveira.

When he spoke to CNN Travel, Oliveira was on the 12th of a 14-day quarantine in Montreal, after returning home from a business trip to the Dominican Republic followed by a personal trip to Mexico. He has been quarantined four times in the past seven months, spending 56 days at home without the possibility of leaving.

This kind of investment of time, along with the confusion surrounding requirements – getting to and from home – are major impediments for people who would otherwise be willing to travel. Security is essential, but those in the industry are advocating a more differentiated and layered approach.

A testing mechanism is needed to avoid quarantines, says Tori Emerson Barnes, executive vice president of public relations and politics for the national nonprofit US Travel Association, which has advocated a science and risk-based approach to reopening international travel ” in particular, considering quarantine elimination if you have the correct test protocol in place. ”

Although vaccines are critical, Oliveira and others say the travel industry absolutely cannot wait to accelerate until vaccines are fully administered globally, making testing an essential part of the equation for safer travel in the short term.

While US Travel encourages people to get vaccinated and test in places that require quarantine, the association is not looking for general requirements for access, Barnes said. “We wouldn’t say that you need a vaccine to travel.”

She recognizes that determining who is responsible for creating and implementing consistent protocols is a challenge. “The government doesn’t necessarily want,” she said, “and I don’t know if the private sector should have that responsibility.”

Even so, countries and organizations around the world are making progress in coordinating common approaches, says Alessandra Priante, regional director for Europe at the World Tourism Organization (WTO), a specialized United Nations agency.

A coordinated form of testing is already being implemented in a number of cases, and the next step at the global level is tracking, says Priante, “to ensure that we are able to share a certain amount of data, because if we don’t make it share the data, so we’re not really able to have all the information that we must Tue.”

Get vaccinated … and prove it

Some of this information probably refers to vaccines. The UK vaccination program is well underway. Other countries have also made significant progress and the United States’ program is growing slowly.

Travelers’ confusion may also increase as more people start to move around in the spring and additional requirements come into play for negative tests and vaccination vouchers.

We need a harmonized global approach to accurately and safely recognize and share information about vaccination and testing, said Oliveira.

Current practices – involving printed documents from unknown laboratories in languages ​​that may be unknown to those who inspect them or a tangle of unconnected databases worldwide – are less than ideal.

Even when vaccines become widely available, not everyone will take them and researchers are evaluating whether the virus can still be transmitted by vaccinated people. Masking, social detachment, sanitation and other layers of security will still be part of daily life – and travel – for a long time.

Measures meanwhile

A perfect international trip will not happen overnight.

Unfortunately, like most things related to Covid, these measures are subject to change.

“The corridors can be useful if they are consistent, but then again, they are going up and down, opening and closing in a short time and that hasn’t helped consumers at all,” said Paul Charles, the travel consultant.

The big goal: to mix with strangers

Priante, from the OMT, hopes that the ups and downs will stabilize soon, because the world is losing.

“What I regret most is that all this tourism, which is to trust the unknown … the beauty of exploring, of finding someone you have never met from another culture, from another nation, is kind of waiting and at stake because people they are telling us ‘don’t trust anyone, cross the sidewalk, wear your mask, don’t mix’, “she said from her home in Madrid.

And while Priante and her colleagues took every precaution and continued to travel and work to face the global crisis that is threatening the industry’s livelihood, she wants to see more people traveling safely.

“We want to take the spirit of tourism back to people’s hearts. As tourism is building memories … and we want to go back to that, we want to become the industry of beautiful memories again.”