TravTalk India Online Magazine
Maribel Rodriguez, Senior Vice President, Membership & Commercial, World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), shares that recovery of the tourism sector is paramount, and they have already started working on a plan. She even calls for international coordination and standard protocols across nations.
Nisha Verma
Maribel Rodriguez claims that the overall performance of the tourism sector last year represented 10.3 per cent of global GDP. “One out of 10 jobs on the planet are supported by travel and tourism. Last year, one out of four new jobs were because of us. It has been like that for the last 10 years, growing always in a consistent way. When it comes to Asia Pacific, GDP is 9.8 per cent of tourism and 5.5 per cent growth is shown by this GDP, which is above average economy, which is 4.2 per cent. Setting this context, we can know how important our sector is,” she points out, adding that until now, 121 million jobs have been lost and if nothing is done now, 197 million jobs could be impacted, which means a loss of US$5.5 trillion.
Learn from the past
Rodriguez claims that since COVID-19 has impacted the industry so much, they have been trying to learn from the past. “In 2019, we analysed over 90 crises (2001-2018) and the time we took to recover. It is very different if there is a pandemic, a natural disaster or a political turmoil—all of them have a different recovery path. However, what we have right now is unprecedented. Hence, we need to join forces,” she asserts.
“When the crisis of September 11 happened, the time to recover was the longest and the reason why it happened was because there wasn’t any public-private relation and coordination. In other events like SARS, MERS and Ebola, we saw that the situation was different and we needed to learn from the past in order to have global collaboration and seamless travel experiences. It is important that we have standard protocols to rebuild the trust of travellers. Also, we need to embrace new technologies because COVID-19 is still here and it will be here till a vaccine is found. However, we don’t know how much time it will take to implement and we cannot stop our industry and economy, but we can keep networking and keep travelling. Hence, we need to have global coordination,” she explains.
Remove travel barriers
“To build confidence of the traveller,” Rodrigues says, “we have found the Safe Travels stamp which is the recognition we are giving to destinations, regions and countries. More than 100 destinations worldwide have already got this stamp, and we still have in queue more than 90 destinations in the pipeline.”
In terms of travel barriers, she adds, “We are working on creating international coordination to make sure that there is a test that is going to be defined and agreed to by different countries as standard protocol. We don’t want to have blanket quarantines but only isolated cases, and we are calling for global and international coordination.”
WTTC has already begun working on a recovery plan, Rodriguez claims, concluding, “It was a unique opportunity that was presented in the G20 meeting between the ministers of tourism and the private sector under Saudi Arabia’s leadership. Saudi Arabia had requested to put up a plan to recover 100 million jobs. We have started working on it and we are calling to have international destination protocols as well as international coordination.”
