Retool to revive

Former Tourism Secretary Parvez Dewan says that while the COVID-19 pandemic has definitely shaken the tourism industry, reinventing and retooling ourselves might save the day.

Nisha Verma

The first step to reviving from the ill-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is to ‘retool ourselves,’ says Parvez Dewan, citing that restaurants have done exactly that with home delivery, and so have hotels by allowing guests to quarantine themselves at different properties. Innovation in every sector is thus required to move forward. Giving more examples, he says, “While vaccinations are being invented, it is required to design walk-in temperature detectors, like metal detectors, at airports and hotels. Additionally, hotel staff needs to be retrained not only in housekeeping but also emergency medical aid. They need to know the SOPs and protocols if someone falls ill or needs to be quarantined. Also, we need to ascertain if there will be a requirement for quarantine rooms within hotels. The staff, too, needs to be well-versed with the legal aspects of an infected person walking into the hotel. A lot of luxury hotels provide many freebies in the rooms; hand sanitisers should be added to that list.”

For the aircraft, he says, a Quarantine Class should be established, just like First Class, where social distancing can be maintained. “Airlines might have to remove a few seats for the same. However, in the Economy Class, there can be flexi-glass partitions between seats as leaving the middle seat vacant might not be enough. Within airports also, there should be quarantine rooms,” he suggests. Dewan also recommends flexi-glass partitions between seats.

Policy recommendations

In order to avoid crowding, instead of locking markets down, they should be opened 24 hours, says Dewan. “It’s a very bad idea to restrict the number of hours a shopkeeper can operate by opening the markets only for two to three hours a day. All the customers would go to the shops during that limited period and are guaranteed to jostle against each other. It is not the shopkeeper who needs to be quarantined, it’s the crowd we must reduce. Hence, extending the market hours to 24 hours is a better idea so that one can divide the crowd throughout the day,” he adds.

The former tourism secretary suggests that such a measure can be adopted at tourist hotspots as well. “Instead of crowding people to one destination in certain hill stations, we need to have a quota of tourists allowed in one place to not let the crowds accumulate anywhere,” he says while also advocating the need to diversify destinations in the country.

Countries India must focus on

In terms of countries that India should focus on as source markets, Dewan says that the situation is dynamic and changes month to month. “Indonesia is in a bad shape currently. While India was in great shape last year, it has been in a very bad shape for the past two months. Right now, Europe is doing well. Even some of our neighbouring countries like Nepal are not doing well, while Bangladesh is better. Bangladesh is a huge source of tourists to India and we should continue to focus on it. Europe, Australia and New Zealand have always been relatively free of COVID. While there are no fixed solutions, during COVID we should look at the figures once a week and see which countries are doing well and which aren’t,” he suggests.