Thanks to coronavirus, we may have already reached ‘peak travel’

After restrictions are eased, we will travel less frequently than before. It won’t be because we can’t fly to Spain, writes Hamish McRae, it will be because we want to spend our money on something else

Hong Kong is among the states to impose new restrictions on citizens amid signs of a ‘second spike’ in Covid-19 infections (Getty)

Travel restrictions cannot be a long-term solution to the coronavirus pandemic. The World Health Organisation is right about that. As its emergency programme director, Dr Mike Ryan, put it: “It is going to be almost impossible for individual countries to keep their borders shut for the foreseeable future. Economies have to open up, people have to work, trade has to resume.”

But the reality is restrictions are cropping up all over the world. The UK’s quarantine on people arriving from Spain is one (rather disorganised) example of that. Germany, meanwhile, has announced a more nuanced ban on travel to Spain, avoiding non-essential travel to the regions of Catalonia, Navarra and Aragon.

As evidence of a second wave of the virus mounts, there are many examples too. Hong Kong has just banned meetings of more than two people and shut its restaurants. Vietnam has forced thousands of tourists to evacuate from the city of Da Nang. The Australian government has said that its six-week lockdown in parts of the state of Victoria may have to be extended as new cases have risen sharply.

In Japan the push to get people back into offices has been reversed, and emergency measures announced earlier in the crisis now look like being extended. Americans still cannot travel to almost all of Europe, and British and European people cannot visit the US.

Public support for these measures is fraying. In the early stages of the pandemic it was public opinion that pushed governments into more restrictive measures – certainly in the UK, but also across much of Europe and in most states in the US. Now there is pushback. That is partly because of the blanket way in which restrictions have often been imposed. It certainly seems silly to treat Britons returning from holidays in the south and northwest of Spain, where infection rates are low, in the same way as those coming from Barcelona, which is struggling with a new serious outbreak.

How do you differentiate? You test, and you ask people to use common sense. If they have been in an area where there has been a severe outbreak, they need to be very careful for 10 days when they get home.

But while a more sophisticated response would gather more public support, and probably be more effective in curbing transmission, it isn’t going to answer Dr Ryan’s point above: that you cannot shut down travel for the foreseeable future.

However – and this is the key point – the blow to international travel will leave a scar that will take decades to heal. The world may have reached “peak travel”.

The proposition is that, a generation from now, people in the present developed world will travel less than they did last year. If that is right it will have profound implications. Maybe Asian and African travel will rise as incomes climb, but for Europe, America, Australia and Japan it would be an enormous shock. This would not simply be the end of Britons having a stag party in Prague, or for frozen New Yorkers a winter weekend to get some sun down in Miami. Travel, particularly air travel, would have to be much more planned, much less spontaneous, much more orderly. You could even say much less self-indulgent.

This will certainly happen in business. Travel will still happen, but it will have to be justified. Already the business world is finding that a lot of time and money can be saved. Part of this is the result of shortening supply chains; you still have to meet suppliers face to face, but maybe you can find suppliers nearer home. But the more frivolous aspects of business travel are being jettisoned.

As for leisure travel, expect the Scandinavian concept of flygskam, which means “flight shaming”, to spread across Europe. If people want to travel they should do so by train and boat rather than aircraft. Of course, that severely limits where you can go when time is limiting you. You can go across the Atlantic by boat, even by sail as Greta Thunberg did, but it is not a viable option for most people. Realistically, people will still fly around the world. It is simply that they will fly rather less often than they do now, and stay for longer when they get there.

We are not used to the idea that there should be restrictions on travel. We are not used to the idea of quarantine – the only time I remember that was over the outbreak of polio in Ireland when I was a child in the 1950s.

When you get a shock, if it runs counter to an existing trend then its effects don’t last long. But if it reinforces a trend, the shock speeds up that transformation. Thus, the move to shopping online was well established and has now been massively reinforced by lockdown conditions.

The future of international travel, however, is less certain. Until Covid-19, air travel was booming, particularly in Asia but also in Europe and North America. The moral pushback in Sweden was a signal that this tide might be turning, as Sweden is often an early indicator of future social trends. But it was only a small trend.

Now there is a possibility – we cannot yet know – that even when restrictions on travel are eased, we will still travel less frequently than before. It won’t be because we can’t fly down to Spain. It will be because we want to spend our money on something else.