Fewer cases, better prospects

Hardy, CEO, PATA, shares his learnings from the ‘year of the pandemic’ and how it can be a guide for the future. He believes that while recovery will be slow and gradual from the impact on numbers and revenue due to the pandemic, reaching pre-COVID level of growth does not seem like a possibility before 2024.

Nisha Verma

For Mario Hardy, it is the importance of resilience that will be the biggest takeaway from 2020. “We have always been told in the past to have a financial reserve personally as well as for the business, and till 10 years ago people said that one needs to save as reserve for three months, which later became six months, and then one year. However, in the current situation, one probably needs several years of reserve to be able to sustain this type of crisis we are  facing today. At PATA, we are very fortunate that we built a very strong reserve for the last couple of years, which allows us to sustain this crisis for the foreseeable future. Year 2020 highlighted what I already knew and highlighted the importance of saving, to prepare us to be more resilient in the future because sadly, this is not the only crisis we will be facing in years to come, but certainly it is the largest I have ever experienced in my life so far,” he said speaking at ‘PATA 101 Webinar: Year-end Wrap-up & Going into 2021’.

When asked about destination management trends for 2021, Hardy said that they had done many surveys throughout the year to get a better understanding of what people are looking for. Sharing some interesting findings, he said, “We did some sentiment analysis in many regions and the great news for all of us is that there is an immense desire for people to travel as soon as borders open safely. Not only domestically, people are keen to travel internationally as well. However, they are looking for something different than what they were looking for before, as they want to be away from crowds. They want to go to nature-based destinations and more eco-friendly places. They will also pay a lot more attention to sanitisation, hygiene, health and safety. These are some things people are paying more attention to than they were doing before. Hence, destinations need to be prepared that when they do their marketing in years to come, this information will be critical in their plans to move forward. It is not only about marketing, it’s also about making sure that you use the proper safety protocols and sanitisation protocols in your respective facilities or products or transportation modes,” he emphasised.

He also mentioned that many other things would change in the pre and post COVID world. “We know from our research and also from our collaborations with all the other international organisations across the world that we will not see a recovery to the same level of growth that we had pre-COVID until 2024,” the CEO added.

Hardy also said that there is a need for dispersing tourists in a destination instead of having them in one place. “PATA has been promoting dispersal of tourism for many years, and now we have an opportunity to restart tourism in a different way and encourage people to disperse in new destinations within the country. In future, it will be the number of cases and vaccination that will govern people’s interest to travel.”