3 Big Uncertainties Now Facing Travel’s Recovery With the Omicron Variant
Photo Credit: Old Town Edinburgh, Scotland, this fall season Flirck Commons / cattan2011
Skift Take
From consumer confidence to tourism board revenues potentially taking another big hit, the tourism industry continues to be at risk, especially with a new set of unknowns surrounding Covid's newest variant. It's not too late for travel leaders to demand urgent global vaccine distributions.
A year ago, when the Delta variant was first detected, vaccines were not yet accessible to the world. Since then, just over 54 percent of the global population has been fully vaccinated. Of those, less than 10 percent are in Africa, while just 5.7 percent of the population in all low income countries has received at least one dose. The egregious disparity in vaccine distributions, flagged all year long as a threat — including by the United Nations World Health Organization, epidemiologists, Doctors Without Borders and Skift — was left largely unaddressed by the U.S. and the European Union, not least in the face of resistance from Big Pharma to release intellectual property rights.
As more countries rush in the past several days to restrict entry or close borders entirely for two weeks like Israel, the uncertainty is intensifying again for the travel industry just as travelers were returning to the road for the holidays and making plans for 2022, the first year of a br
