The future of air travel
As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, air travel ground to a near halt as some countries paused the issuing of visitor visas and others suspended visa-free travel reciprocity. The air travel industry will now be seeking avenues to recover from its biggest crisis since the 9/11 attacks in 2001.
Countries such as South Africa, India and Malaysia were among those who halted issuing visor visas, while countries such as the United States, Australia and New Zealand suspended visa-free travel reciprocity. As lockdown measures have been eased in many countries, the resumption of a high level of air travel has been dependent on both science and the political decisions of governments worldwide.
South Africa, for example, recently made moves to restart its tourism industry, but with domestic travel only permitted. Minister for Tourism Mmamoloko Kubayi-Ngubane said that the “decision to open the country’s external borders will be based on an assessment of scientific evidence”. Ireland’s gradual reopening had operated upon similar lines, with “staycations” encouraged both as a way to avoid differing transmission rates in other countries and as a way to aid the local tourism industries so badly affected by the pandemic.
Measures such as these were of little use to the air travel industry in a country as small as Ireland, where domestic air travel is low. The first steps to recovery for international air travel to and from Ireland began in July, but this immediately sparked controversy and worries of a second wave with reports of tourists, specifically Americans, failing to observe quarantine measures that the Government was not monitoring, and some establishments within the tourism industry refusing to serve them as a result.
“Travel bubbles” or “air bridges”, where states reach mutual agreements to open their borders to each other but keep them closed to other countries, seem to be the way that air travel will slowly resume. Countries have also moved to encourage travel to and from other countries where the virus has been tackled well, with the Irish Government’s Green List — 10 countries from which arriving and returning tourists would not be required to quarantine — being an example.
Requirements for Irish citizens to quarantine for two weeks after visiting any country other than the 10 on the Green List, which does not include popular destinations such as France, Spain or the United States, will have also frustrated the air travel industry, with it unlikely that workers who have returned to their office will be able to access the amount of time off require to both travel and quarantine upon return.
The airline industry is internationally suffering its biggest crisis since the 11 September 2001 attacks, which prompted worldwide fears about safety and impacted the numbers of those travelling (2002 saw a fall to 1.63 billion passengers worldwide from 2001’s 1.66 billion) and led to furloughs, redundancies and consolidations across the industry. Similar, if not worse, is predicted now, with British Airways (BA) having furloughed 22,600 staff at one point and announced plans to make at least 12,000 of its 42,000 strong workforce redundant. BA’s parent company, the International Consolidated Airlines Group (IAG) reported losses of €535 million in the first three months of 2020.
In July, Irish Airline Pilots’ Association President Evan Cullen told the Oireachtas Special Committee on Covid-19 response that it was unsustainable for Aer Lingus (also under the IAG umbrella) to continue spending €1.5 million per day with little revenue in return. Cullen pointed to the state aid received by BA and Iberia, IAG’s Spanish airline, a point that may come as an acknowledgment that the future of the airline industry may well be in the new coalition’s hands.
