It's fair to say that the travel situation is getting desperate. Not only are a mounting number of companies facing financial hardship and potential bankruptcy, the would be travelling public don’t know whether they are coming or going.
And, with winter looming it might now take too much to break the back of the travel industry. Even those who were dreaming of going skiing this winter have already had a knock back with most of the large operators cancelling chalet holidays because of the complications involved with enforcing Covid hygiene measures.
The sun and beach sector has been hit this summer, now it’s the winter tourism industry which is braced for an avalanche of cancellations and postponed bookings. In the meantime, more than 20 travel and tourism bodies as well as unions across Europe united yesterday to demand quarantine restrictions be replaced with an EU-wide testing protocol.
They have signed an open letter to European Commission president Ursula von der Leven warning that the livelihoods of more than 27 million Europeans who work in the sector are at risk.
The groups, representing more than 5,000 member companies, point to a continued lack of co-ordination and diverging travel restrictions as crippling their business. Unless some unified clarity is introduced, come Easter a whole year’s worth of tourism will have been lost and not easy to recover.