When Will Domestic Travel Start Again?

In a special report for Canadian Travel Press, Eric Barber writes that if the Canadian government was looking for any guidelines on how to put the travel and tourism industry in Canada back to work, they might want to consider a new report from Germany’s Kompetenzzentrum Tourismus des Tourismus and represents the first document in tourism that plots a timeline for the return of tourism in Germany based on select factors: politics, economics and science.

The report identifies four phases of COVID-19, which are represented by Shutdown, Loosening, Revival & Normalization.

• Shutdown is the current state of affairs in the majority of countries in the world where isolation takes place and only non-essential businesses stay open.
• Loosening represents the first step of allowing meetings of people up to 100 people and permitting people to travel domestically, overnights, visit family, etc.
• Revival represents the ability to travel within the European Union and potentially larger assemblages of people, but these can be withdrawn at any time if new infections commence.
• Normalization is defined as a vaccine being readily available and the assumption of extensive immunity, with full normalization of travel as it was based on 2019.

For the full story, check out this week’s digital edition of CANADIAN TRAVEL PRESS.