The Hard Reboot: Technology Powers Mobility
This paper aims to analyse and lay out solutions to simultaneously navigate COVID-19’s impact and build a resilient travel and tourism Industry in the post-COVID-19 world. The author has identified a few growth areas that are noteworthy such as solutions for contactless travel, consumer tools for travel distribution, customer retention solutions for travel companies and more.
Overview
The travel and tourism industry has exhibited positive growth, outpacing the growth rate of world real GDP since 2011. The world has seen a 4% increase in total international arrivals, and a value of approximately US$2.9 trillion to GDP in 2019, according to the World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) (2019) and Statista (2020).
However, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, 100% of all worldwide destinations have introduced travel restrictions and travel bans starting from April 2020. Everyone has been forced to adjust to a new reality of mandated limits on travel and anti-pandemic restrictions. Cancellation of travel bookings was at its highest, and travel movements were reduced drastically due to lockdown policies implemented by the local governments. As of December 2021, over a year has passed since the introduction of worldwide travel restrictions, but the T&T industry is still being affected due to reoccurring outbreaks of COVID-19 worldwide.
In this report, PATA and Vynn Capital explore past pandemics’ impacts, examine potential losses of future pandemics due to the lack of a coordinated technological approach, and, most importantly, highlight noteworthy technology solutions for travel recovery, propose the framework of seamless travel journey enabled by technology, and provide adjusted Travel Tourism Index (TTCI) as a benchmark for the creation of competitive travel environment to enable mobility.