A PANEL ON REIMAGINING Travel
Escape To recently hosted a Reimagining Travel panel for travel industry professionals and travelers, as travel has come to a halt due to COVID-19. With the travel industry as a whole at a standstill, we saw an opportunity to take this time to think about how the industry needs a reset and change. Through the years we’ve spoken to other travel operators and travelers who did not like the negative impacts that travel has had on the people and places they were visiting. Prior to COVID-19, many aspects of the travel industry were rapidly harming the environment and people whose very cultures and way of life are precious to our travel experiences. Thus, we started questioning whether we want to go back to a world where travel is harming the planet or do we want to rebuild a world and industry that is more sustainable, conscious and kind to the planet?
As Arundathi Roy wrote, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Prachi Jain of Escape To along with our panelists, Wendy Werneth from The Nomadic Vegan, Mariellen Ward from Breathe Dream Go and Lauren Yakiwchuk from Justin Plus Lauren, are taking a stand to be a part of transforming the travel industry and coming out of this pandemic as a better and stronger industry.
Panel Takeaways
Post COVID-19, travelers will want to travel less, but be more selective by choosing trips that are both more meaningful and unique rather than commercialized, such as engaging in smaller group tours, ancestry trips, nature trips, eco-conscious trips and wellness trips. According to Justin Plus Lauren, these trips will allow travel to become a much more personal experience and allow people to become more immersed in the cultures they are visiting and provide them with a sense of self-discovery.
The growth of the vegan and vegetarian travel industry may continue thriving, especially in light of COVID-19. Wendy Werneth pointed out that the majority of infectious diseases, including COVID, are zoonotic, meaning they spread in non-human animals and jump to humans. To prevent the likelihood of future pandemics, less consumption, exploitation and contact with animals may take precedent to heighten the safety of travelers and reinforce eco-conscious travel efforts.
The development of a vaccine will be the turning point in travel safety. It will allow travelers to feel safer and may become an international travel requirement, along with travel medical insurance, in a post COVID-19 world, in order to ensure the safety of travelers and citizens from the tragedy of future pandemics.
Although the COVID-19 pandemic has lowered the carbon footprint of travelers on the environment, there are still negative ramifications of the lack of travelers such as a rise in poaching, less funding towards animal conservation efforts and less money in local economies. Travelers’ admission fees and presence both help to fund conservation and keep poachers away from popular safari destinations, ensuring the safety of the animals and their spending help local communities. Breathe Dream Go predicts that as travel bloggers begin re-entering the industry, there needs to be a concentrated effort towards responsible and authentic travel content and traveling to places where our money will help support animal protection efforts and local communities.
At the end of the panel, the attendees were broken up into smaller groups of 5 to discuss their aspirations for the type of travel that should thrive and the type that should fade away in a post-pandemic world. Several groups shared insights from their group discussions including taking more personal responsibility to take steps towards eco-conscious travel, how boycotting air travel may not be a solution to reduce carbon footprints, but instead focusing on advocating for greener jet fuel at the policy level, the ethics of beginning to travel this summer and on the types of industries that we hope fade away such as large cruises.
We hope this panel creates an understanding that in order to build a better travel industry we need to be proactive, rather than reactive, and make the changes needed to not only eliminate the potential for future pandemics but to also create a more conscious and compassionate future for the communities, environment and people we want to explore through travel. We at Escape To and along with our panelists, hope that you can join us in creating a more sustainable and kind future for travel.
Did you miss the panel? Not to worry! You can download a copy of the panel to watch or listen to:
Reimagining Travel Panel Recording
Do you have any questions, feedback or resources that will help us reimagine travel? Want to get in touch with the panelists? Get in touch with Escape To Director Prachi Jain at prachi@fairkonnect.com.