The recovery for travel starts here, with rewards for those who make the first move

The industry of human happiness has never felt more miserable but 2021 promises much for the tourist, from cheap sunshine to high culture, reports Simon Calder

Luxury cruise ships being scrapped in Izmir, Turkey. With the pandemic pushing the multi-billion-dollar cruise industry into crisis, some operators have been forced to cut losses and retire ships earlier than planned (Getty)

Advent brings many traditions. In the travel journalism world, the last few weeks of the year are customarily spent curating inspiration – compiling lists of interesting destinations to contemplate in the coming 12 months.

December 2020 has been different. The key task for the first three weeks, as it has been for the past nine months, was to keep across the amorphous, random tangle of restrictions on travel that the coronavirus pandemic has brought.

Midwinter’s day brought a ripple of travel bans aimed squarely at arrivals from the UK. As I write, almost all of Europe is off limits with Italy, for example, warning citizens about the Mutazione Inglese. Prohibitions of flights from Britain are spreading across the Caribbean. The Dominican Republic domino has just fallen as it becomes the latest nation with a travel ban. 

The industry of human happiness has never felt more miserable. Every time hoteliers, airlines, cruise lines and travel agents think things can’t get any worse, they do.

An excellent example of the wretched uncertainty instilled by government’s chopping and changing is Spain’s Canary Islands. The prime winter-sun destination was opened up to British holidaymakers in late October. Anyone in England foolish enough to book for November found themselves hamstrung by lockdown 2.0, which stopped them getting to the airport. Then, in December, quarantine exemption was removed again. Another victory for the government’s medical advisers.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic there has been a tension between the health industry and the travel industry. The gradual destruction of travel and tourism is largely seen as collateral damage: regrettable but tolerable.

The travel industry has been devastated more than any other part of the economy. Its fundamental promise is to keep vast numbers of people on the move. Intense competition means margins are low, but in the many good years that still means a decent living for hundreds of thousands of people in the UK – and rewarding travel experiences for tens of millions.

However much you and I might appreciate the opportunities and benefits that travel provides, the industry gets little public sympathy. The rapid global spread of coronavirus was enabled by aviation, with the implication that the damage is ultimately self-inflicted.

The average Brit would be at far lower risk of contracting coronavirus if they were enjoying a more benign climate somewhere closer to the equator, rather than an indoor existence in the UK. But the belief that stopping travel is a good thing has been a constant theme of the government – even though it has refused to release any figures on the effectiveness of the various iterations of quarantine policy.

For each day that the campaign against travel continues, every major airport, airline and package-holiday company is losing millions of pounds. Poster child for the woes of travel is cruising. In 2019, cruise ships carried 30 million passengers a year. According to the Cruise Lines International Association, the sector is worth £10 billion to the UK economy alone and supports more than 88,000 British jobs.

The coronavirus unfolded on our screens in the bulky shape of Diamond Princess: an infection hub moored at Yokohama with more Covid-19 cases than most countries, its passengers held captive to the virus.

Even after the ocean-going hostages were released – with some of them just grabbing cabs to the airport and flying home without further precautions – several ships spent many weeks trying to find a safe haven, with elderly and vulnerable passengers dying on board.

Anyone thinking of booking a sea-going cruise in 2021 or beyond should be aware that the Foreign Office has warned against them for the past 40 weeks, with no indication of any alleviation

The afflictions for cruising are even more intense than for any other part of the travel industry. The pandemic has hit every aspect of the extremely complex logistics of a cruise operation, with a labyrinth of restrictions on the movement of people and vessels – which, as the crisis developed, became pariahs.

Before the coronavirus crisis, cruise ships were at the forefront of industrialised tourism. Efficiently and affordably, they took holidaymakers around the sights of the world. Today, almost all are ghost ships: frozen in time and space, and suffering the ignominy of becoming tourist attractions in their own right. One of my travel highlights of 2020 has been a boat trip around the monumental emptiness at anchor off the coast of Dorset.

And anyone thinking of booking a sea-going cruise in 2021 or beyond should be aware that the Foreign Office has warned against them for the past 40 weeks, with no indication of any alleviation.

Mind you, according to the FCDO almost the whole world is “unacceptably high risk,” even if coronavirus infection rates are far lower than the UK. The Foreign Office has slavishly followed the often-questionable decisions of the Department for Transport on quarantine, trashing its previously excellent reputation for objective travel advice in the process.

Currently only one African country – Rwanda – is deemed to be acceptably low risk by the FCDO, even though the key tourism nations of South Africa, Kenya and Egypt also have coronavirus case rates way below the UK’s.

Foreign Office advice, however flawed, does not constitute an instruction. Hundreds of thousands of British holidaymakers have cheerfully ignored it during 2020, with the travel insurance industry responding with tailored policies covering trips that breach the advice.

That trend is likely to continue in 2021. Test and quarantine restrictions will begin to ease as vaccination programmes bestow protection on the most at-risk people. Well before that, I predict a travel arms race will begin on Boxing Day as tourism-dependent nations seek to win back business and rebuild their shattered economies with the help of British tourists.

Egypt is an excellent case study. Exactly a year ago I was in Sharm-el-Sheikh, reporting on its opening up after the UK government lifted its terrorism-related travel ban. Three months later, when I was in Egypt once more, I spent £700 on a ticket back from Cairo as flight plans fell like dominoes around the world.

Now, the country that offers blue skies, warm seas and ancient history offers on-arrival PCR tests for coronavirus, conducted by health ministry staff, for just $30 (£23) at the key Red Sea resort airports. Visa fees have been dropped to these destinations, as well as Luxor and Aswan on the Upper Nile. And airlines are incentivised to fly to the sun with discounts on airport charges and handling fees.

After a year of living domestically we will appreciate global horizons all the more. As the world’s recovery gets under way, cut-price sunshine will be one enticement; crowd-free travel and compelling new cultural draws will be others.

The traveller who is prepared to tolerate face masks, testing and the diminishing risk of being caught on the wrong side of someone else’s lockdown will be rewarded by the chance to see increasing parts of the world without the crowds. And with many new openings postponed to 2021, there are twice as many good reasons to travel.

In Africa, the big cultural debut will be the much-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo – the ultimate demonstration of the breadth and depth of human creativity, set beside the pyramids of Giza.

In Rome, the Mausoleum of Augustus has been resurrected. In the 1930s Mussolini intended the magnificent circular structure to be his tomb. It then became a derelict dumping ground, but will soon open as an artfully restored window on the ancient world.

My prediction for America’s cultural hotspot for 2021: the ninth-largest city in the small and unremarkable state of Arkansas. It’s Bentonville, the birthplace and galactic headquarters of Walmart. Some of the Walton family fortune has been spent on The Momentary, a spectacular contemporary arts venue.

With a new occupant in the White House, the presidential ban on travellers from Europe may be lifted in time for the opening on 20 February of the Derrick Adams exhibition, Sanctuary, about the Green Book, a travel guide to the US that highlighted businesses that did not discriminate against African American travellers.

On 23 January, Paris should finally gain the most hotly anticipated museum in Europe thanks to more private wealth. The French billionaire François Pinault, whose company owns the brands Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, has taken over the old stock exchange, the Bourse de Commerce. He has spent €150m (£137m) in creating a new space for his Pinault Collection in the heart of the French capital. The Japanese architect Tadao Ando has created a giant cylinder to nest in the atrium.

For now, the near-Continent will be far enough for many. Many destinations in Australasia and Asia seem as unattainable as they did half-a-century ago, when cost – rather than coronavirus restrictions – was the impediment. As risk reduces, horizons will open. But slowly. For many years, 2019 will be remembered as symbolising “peak travel” – with all the environmental and cultural harm it brought alongside economic and social benefits.

Despite the predictions across the industry, travel will never get back to “normal”. Once it resumes at scale, I believe tourism will be more gentle on the planet. A trip to Victorville, California, will be seen as a rare and precious opportunity rather than a long weekend’s entitlement. And the attraction? A parade of gently decaying Jumbo jets that a year ago powered their gas-guzzling way around the world but are now monuments to excess.

Despite the unprecedented midwinter bleakness of December 2020, the Twenties will be a wonderful decade for travellers. Enough dreaming: start planning.