Name: On the Road Again: Traveling in a Post-Pandemic Era
Uploaded: 2020-12-04
Duration: 17 min 2 s
Description: Experts on the new normal of tourism

On the Road Again: Traveling in a Post-Pandemic Era

Travel

So, um, I want to try to get right into it, go around the room a little bit and get a sense from people of of what the impact of the pandemic has been on their particular corner of the travel world. If I could keep, I wonder if I could start with you. It's a painful situation for Singapore because, uh, school board has actually been incredibly successful in flattening the curve. You have this spike that was a little frightening in mid April, but since then, really quite disciplined. And last I checked, uh, new daily cases in Singapore were in the single digits, which is quite remarkable. But, uh, your market is not big enough that you can really make up for the loss of the external travelers. I mean, what kinds of things are you doing to cope? Well, um, first of all, the situation in terms of the cases is virtually as you say. You know, it's single digits, and almost all of those single digits are imported cases. People coming back into Singapore, So within the community, pretty much one or zero on on most days. Alright, so that has given us a lot more room to reopen Most things that we take for granted, including eating out, going for activities outside and eating people within certain limits. Of course. Uh, in terms of the impact, obviously you're right and that we don't have a bigger domestic. Don't don't have a big domestic tourism market, unlike China or Hong Kong, Australia. And so the impact has been tremendous on our tourism industry are responses have been number one. How can we reserve food capabilities? Because we really S s others have pointed out There's a lot of demand to travel, pent up demand. So how then do we sustain good companies, good attractions, good to operators capabilities that we need so that when the recovery happens, those companies are still going to be around to the demand? So that was one of our main preoccupations and then designing support packages to help those sorts of companies high through this time the number two And how do we then build as much demand as we can? Using domestic resources looked around and we found that Singapore and spend a huge amount of money overseas. Singaporeans are very, very well travelled people, and this is the year they can't travel. How can we then channel some of that demand some of that expenditure domestically? And that's why we launched a Singapore rediscovered campaign to drive up more interest in domestic tourism in July. And then just two days ago, we launched the Singapore Rediscovers Bouncers, which is a $320 million to support tourism by incentivizing locals to go for hotel stays or attractions. First, I talk a little bit more about those, uh, in the in the hour ahead. Um, but let me turn next to Craig if I could. So, Greg Mary, obviously the biggest hotel system in the in the world, I was just sort of kind of thing at your website, um, earlier today, something like 1.4 million rooms, uh, 7300 properties at the end of last year, I mean, just enormous and and 2019 was It was an absolute record year for Mary It. I think you added something like 520 new hotels to the network just in one year alone, and I read it was that you were adding a new property every 17 hours or something like that and then, wham, we slam into, uh, 2020 And, uh, it's kind of a different, a different era. And you're in an interesting position because you've been, uh, head of a pack, uh, the region that has really been the most robust, uh, during this pandemic, and you're now moving up just in a few days going back to the United States for a new, larger role as the head of the international group, which will have a whole different set of challenges of complexity. So can you give us a sense of what what the impact has been like for myriad of this pandemic and tough? You know? You know, when I talked to friends and family, we we kind of go through and say, Listen, cruise ships, airlines and hotels, it's been probably the toughest. We can put 2000 and eight and 2001 together, and it still doesn't compare, and it's affected, obviously all the thing that button to our businesses in the travel industry. So it feels like we've been going through a pretty bad storm, you know, you look and we're looking at now, and the clouds are still dark, but you know if you look a little bit of ways to see some blue sky and you know when you're waiting that storm, that kind of just ask. It feels like we're getting close. You have the vaccines out there you've got and and this is the word we call it. Travel us. It's interesting. People really want to get out to travel. We have people going to our website and just kind of like me with Connie and my wife catches me tripping Bacardi websites like a motorcycle and just daydreaming about the next week. I'm gonna by having that was right. Now people are going on websites just waiting for that time. They can hit the go button, they can take off. And so there's that pent up demand. We're seeing it regionally, and that's been very good. So in in the state, agents have been a huge people that have just decided I want to check the hotel and work, which is another trend that were also seen. Um and then in places like China, it's almost like they're back to business. We've got great partners like Jane and the sea trip that are that we're working really well together with them. And you've got all this pent up demand the Chinese outbound business. Uh, but there's no outbound right now, so we'll head high and and do the chunking and anywhere they can to to kind of take a short vacation. Jane, um, let me ask you how it how it looks from your vantage point leading trip dot com. Uh, you just announced your third quarter results. Uh uh, What did you learn from that? And what can we What can we infer about what's going on in the travel industry both in China and globally, from sure China was the first country which got hit by the coronavirus in January. I was with Arnie from area at Davos when the country decided to have a lockdown, so it was very difficult during that time. But we reach out to the global CEO of hotels and airlines and reach out to them, and we're very appreciative of the support we've got globally. So we launched 22 billion Natural Disaster Relief Fund to help our customers during the very difficult time. We also, uh, established one billion partnership fund to help small businesses to sustain the storm, and we work with our banks to inject 10 billion small business loans to help the ecosystem. So through Q two, we narrow the laws and, uh, Q three, which we just announced the earning. Yesterday. We made about 1.6 billion on the bottom line, which is very inspiring for all the other players in the market. Um, going forward, we feel there are a couple of trends we have observed. First of all, people pay lots of attention to safety. So whoever join us for the safety guidelines will get lots of travelers a lot of volumes. Secondly, our customers prefer to have smaller group tool rather than bigger group tool. So they prefer to travel with their close families, good friends who they know very well. And certainly the young customers prefer to travel with flexible package with cancel herbal changeable options. So we are doing a lot customize the tool to help the customers and address their concerns and their uh, favor during this special time. But so far, the domestic travel is growing very well. Uh, secondly, we're also hoping with the countries which have demonstrated a good ability to control the virus will be able to have some kind of bubble to send our outbound customers there. We work with keys very closely, uh, to have rediscovered Singapore and I yesterday the number I've seen reached an all time high. So congratulations on a very successful campaign. Uh, so we're hoping that with the joint efforts we have with different travel bureaus and, uh, effective government such as Singapore will be able to unleash some of the energy for the Pantech demand. Uh huh. So, Steve, a lot of this must resonate with the kinds of trends that you're looking at. Uh, Mackenzie, um I'm struck with all three of these comments. One kind of underlying theme is that, you know, uh, people still want to travel and they are keen to do it domestically if you can offer them the right kinds of products. Um, you had some interesting charts and figures on that. I know and and one of your recent reports about how some of the different countries are bearing relative to last year because of the growth of their their domestic travel. I wonder if you could maybe talk a little bit about that maybe kind of enlightened us a bit as the, uh, the different positions of the different economy. Absolutely. And I think first of all, I think we need to realize that while tonight we're all talking about opening up tourism, we need to do that in a safe and responsible way. And first of all, everyone's priority is on making sure that we keep travelers safe and that we're saving lives. And then from there, rebuilding livelihoods. Um, tourism supports millions of jobs across across Asia. I can share a couple of charts. Hopefully you You see this? I'm clearly the story is of is of a domestic recovery story for Asia. All the international lines are practically at the bottom of the chart. No matter what you look at, China is basically back at where it was last year in terms of in terms of tourism recovery. So air passengers backed back already by September to the same level of the previous year. We've seen Thailand recovered domestically as well. The numbers in Thailand are a little lower because Thailand domestics light also relied a lot on foreign tourists flying within Thailand who are not currently present Other countries. We see recoveries, but then also declines again, depending on the, um on the direction of the virus and the new cases. So there's still a lot of caution in in all these markets. I'm actually on the road at the moment. I'm I'm away from home. I'm in a hotel in Beijing. The flights are full, people are traveling as normal, but still a lot of caution. There's lots of checks in place. There's there's, there's masks worn and there's still a lot of nervousness. But broadly, the travel has has returned. And whether that's good or bad, this country by country. Um, I think, as both Craig and Jane pointed out, there are some countries which do actually quite nicely from tourism turning domestically. Big fuck, yeah, tell us a little bit about what we're seeing. Yeah, So what this chart does is it looks at okay, Does a country benefit or not? If all of the tourism spend which used to go internationally, is instead redirected domestically, So basically, if borders are closed, people spend the same amount on travel. Which countries win which countries lose and the obvious winner in terms of tourism here is China, mainland China, here and what this shows is that Chinese tourists going outbound. We're spending $238 billion more than foreign tourists flying, inbound and spending in China. So if people, if the Chinese still traveled as much as they did before and spent as much they did before, this is a massive boost to the domestic tourism industry in China. Now, of course, people are not spending quite as much, but regular. It used to be relatively common for more affluent Chinese to take weekend trips to Japan or Hong Kong and so on. They're now taking those two, um, resorts within China cities, especially resort hotels within 2 to 3 hours drive in the major cities, and they're they're having their best years ever. I expect Craig would see as well. So I want to talk a little bit about kind of how we can make the turn out of the lockdown, uh, into a situation where more people can start to travel again. Craig, maybe turn to you. What? What are you forecasting? Uh, narrated. Are you expecting that all of a sudden there'll be this boom where everybody comes roaring back to your hotels or is it going to be a more gradual process, It's gonna be another. I'm sorry. Most of my answers today are gonna be depend a lot going to depend on borders opening, right? A lot of it really is out of the hands of the industry. It's I think these travel bubbles would get bigger and stronger, and a lot has to do also with different governments. Um, almost coming to agreements On what? You know what? What? What do you need to travel? You need proof of vaccine. How do you show that proof? Um, on the on the other side do hotel workers or airline workers need to be vaccine? There's all those questions that go about, we think, and we see that there's a great desire to travel. You know, there's been a lot of questions about, you know, everyone's using zoom like we are now, or teams, and they've gotten used to it. But the truth of the matter is, uh, they still want to go out, shake hands. They want to have those experiences that Jane talked about. You want to fly a helicopter, scuba dive and all these things and what we're also seeing which is interesting is people now learn these technologies. They wanna they wanna go and spend the weekend or the week on the Maldives and do a zoom were called from there. So there is some advantage of this increase in technology. It doesn't mean that people will stay home in the future. I just think it means people be able to work different. Um, we've got one more question. I think that we maybe have time for, uh, just a couple of a couple of minutes remaining. Um, and it's a question about rapid testing at airports whether it can really offer an alternative to quarantine making bubbles effectively obsolete as travel can be made independent of local transmission case. Um, anyone have any thoughts on that? I think it's going to depend on the market in the country, like for countries which are not at zero and so are therefore willing to take the 5% risk that the test was inaccurate. I think absolutely testing can be a way of opening up sooner and quicker, and that's what we're likely to see. Transatlantic, For example, Um however, for countries like Singapore, like Australia and so on, which have won the hard fought fight of getting to zero. I don't think they're going to accept a 90% accurate test instead of the quarantine. Yeah, I agree. I think taking the test is definitely going to be very helpful. But there is a period the government is afraid of for the hidden period which is anywhere between 70 to 14 days. So to maximize the protection for the domestic market, China has taken 14 days quarantine. So what we were hoping for is that for the scientists to re really have a breakthrough to reach the efficacy for more than 90% to narrow the gap so that the test towards enough can I chime in as well? I agree with Steve that if it were just at the point of the airport a point of entry into the city, then that would not be good enough. The concept that what that we are trying to work on in Singapore is apart from testing on arrival, if we can create a system where those travelers can be tested every other day, right? So you think about the statistics Statistically I test negative on day zero. When I arrive, I test you again day to day four day six, you might be incubating on day one. I catch you one day too and so on. Right. So So then if I do regular testing for every other day, then my ability to catch you even if you're incubating on Day zero and you don't present as positive can still catch you on Day two or Day Four. And that's the concept that we're trying to create right now in Singapore. Then please people from having to be quarantined. We're trying to think this through and see how we can roll and throw out the system to enable this.