TravTalk India Online Magazine
Suman Billa, Director, Technical Cooperation and Silk Road Development, UNWTO, talks about how tourism is going to change with the vaccination drives underway across the world. He also highlights some key areas that India needs to work on in order to make its presence felt in the post-pandemic era.
Nisha Verma
Suman Billa believes that the world is at a critical turning point, and that two simultaneously running trends have been noticed. “The first is that several countries are rapidly vaccinating their population and several of them have come very close to hitting levels required for herd immunity. Secondly, the COVID-19 virus is mutating into various forms, especially with ‘Variants of Concern’. Hence, the face-off is how effective vaccination is going to be against the variants of the virus,” he says. Billa also believes that while vaccination will not be able to ward off the virus completely, it will reduce hospitalisation and will reduce mortality, therefore, countries will have to look at the Singapore model.
What India could do
Billa suggests that India should open unhindered travel for those who are vaccinated. “This means that for domestic travel, if I have been vaccinated and I have a certificate to prove it, I should be allowed to travel wherever I can. Secondly, for international travellers, we need to jettison the principle of reciprocity because many countries are looking at opening their borders if the same is reciprocated by the other country. However, when we are in a situation where there is risk, we should only consider a vaccination certificate as proof and ask people to open borders even if it is unilateral,” he adds.
And while there will always be a concern around some countries where the pandemic is raging, Billa says, “You could always ask that to be substituted or augmented by an RT-PCR test certificate that is taken two hours before travel. However, I think the idea is that India should take an open position to activate travel because by this time, all of us are fairly convinced that if you are vaccinated, you pose much less of a risk and you would be able to travel without having much infection.”
Make travel predictable
Billa advocates the idea of making travel more predictable. “If you are going to allow vaccinated people to travel all across, then we also need to have our systems in place, which enable people to travel because today, one of the biggest challenges in travelling, even within India, is that there is a multiplicity of health regulations varying from one state to another. This makes it risky for people to travel. One should be able to give travellers a predictable outlook for them to be able to travel. I think, Government of India and Indian states should sit down along with the industry and MOT, MoCA and Ministry of Health, and should take the lead. The idea is to harmonise and prescribe a system which is predictable and simple for people to travel,” he suggests.
Billa also suggests that we need to look at having an entirely new set of guidelines for the new normal, so that we can reassure inbound tourists of India being a safe destination. “Another thing we could do is to get our hospitality staff vaccinated soon and treat them as frontline workers. Also, we need to see how we can cover the entire population of tourist destinations. This is an approach that would yield dividends in the long run. We could look at two elements—one is LTC, by which we can enable people to travel now instead of in the future and second, to leverage benefits of direct tax for those in the private sector to utilise their LTC now,” he says.
