COVID-19: Travel's new game changer?

 

In my life, I can think of three changes that have affected the way I and many others travel.  The first I was only dimly aware of as I was only seven or eight years old.  The second was a major development that I and millions of other people have taken advantage of (and until COVID-19 hit is were continuing to do).  The third was seismic and its effects are much in evidence to this day.

First, there were the Beeching Cuts.  As a small boy, like thousands of others in Britain, I devoured the Thomas the Tank Engine stories by the Rev. W.H. Awdry that turned many of us into avid trainspotters.  It was easy for me to do so because at the end of my road, perhaps 300 yards away, ran the London to Uckfield railway line, that in those days extended as far as Lewes from where there were many trains to the Sussex coast - Hastings, Eastbourne and of course Brighton.  It made day trips to the coast on hot summer days (there seemed more of them then....) a viable proposition and, for me, an adventure to look forward to.  The Town station was less than half a mile away and in those days was very busy with multiple trains per hour in both directions, and also maintained a large and busy coal depot.  At that time, most houses still maintained coal fires rather than central heating.

I used to spend hours in good weather, on the railway bank beside the station, watching the coal trains coming and going, each pulled by a small black steam tank engine (just like Thomas or perhaps Percy, but a different colour), and the passenger trains heading towards London or the coast.  Some were pulled by larger tank engines, with a wheel configuration of 2-6-2; others, the bigger trains, by splendid looking 4-6-2 or even 4-8-2 wheeled loco's, with engine fairings and streamlining over the boilers -  the famous Battle of Britain Class locomotives with names like Spitfire and Hurricane, or City Class loco's called City of Winchester or Truro, Cambridge or Oxford  I would note down all the loco numbers in an exercise book, then in the evening mark them all off as "seen" in my treasured Ian Allan Train Spotter's Book.   Happy days!

Then along came Dr. Beeching.  The Tory Government in 1961 decided we had too many railways that were unprofitable and commissioned Dr. Richard Beeching, at the time the Chairman of British Railways, to provide a detailed report of how to streamline the network, eliminate the loss making (mainly branch) lines and increase profitability.  The result was the closure by the early 1970s of over 2,000 stations and some 5,000 miles of track (representing 55% and  30% respectively of the network).  Whole swathes of the country found themselves without an easy way to travel from A to B - there was little corresponding increase in public bus services and a high percentage of families, mine included, did not own a car.

In my view, the railways of Britain have never recovered: successive governments, both Tory and Labour, have starved them of funding, privatised them, broken the national company up into dozens of franchises (some more successful than others), and introduced over complex and expensive internet ticketing options that offer literally hundreds of thousands of alternatives to choose from.  In my view it is a complete and utter disgrace.

The second sea change was the introduction and explosive growth of the package holiday industry that introduced millions of Britons to "Abroad".  Beeching made it difficult for my family to get to Pevensey Bay (between Hastings and Eastbourne) for our annual caravan holiday.  But in the early 70s, companies led by Thomas Cook introduced the concept of selling holidays in hot and sunny Mediterranean countries at affordable prices that included hotel accommodation, flights to and from the resorts in Spain and Greece, Italy and France, and all food included.  Often day trips from the hotel to local sites of historic or cultural interest were included (or at least offered at a steep discount).  As the industry developed, trips further afield were offered, to Africa, the Far East, the Caribbean and elsewhere - exotic and more expensive destinations but to a newly affluent population just as popular.

The concept introduced a generation of Brits, me included, to the delights or otherwise of paella and squid, pasta and pizza, strong foreign beer, wine and retsina, passport control and foreign languages, and sunburn that no amount of Ambre Solaire Factor 5 could ease.  It also prompted thousands of us to decamp to foreign shores to run bars and restaurants and act as tour guides in Club 18-30 resorts where unbridled sex was served up with breakfast, dinner and tea and clubbing went on 'til dawn.  True to form, an awful lot of us couldn't handle the foreign cuisine, and before long the pubs and bars were serving instead of grilled octopus and salad good old fish 'n' chips, and instead of a decent local white wine pints of Watney's Red Barrel.  The Med was all the poorer for it.

Nowadays, times have changed and the next generation, dare I say it primed by the easier European travel and cultural mixing that came with membership of the EEC/EU from 1973 until our foolish exit last year, are more comfortable with the exotic foods and drinks on offer, since they are by and large also available in most major towns and cities in Britain now, are able to communicate and get along with our cross-channel neighbours (most of whom speak fluent English in any case), and understand the myriad sun creams and after sun lotions available and are thus able to tan painlessly - especially with a couple of sunbed sessions at Bluewater or wherever before travel.

The package holiday, however, is suffering its own Beeching moment nowadays.  The internet and the advent of budget airlines like RyanAir, EasyJet, WizzAir and others, as well as portals like trivago, hotels.com and airbnb enable you to tailor your holiday online in the comfort of your own home, and a good deal cheaper than the package tours.  Thomas Cook, a company that had been around nearly 150 years before it started introducing us all to the Med delights and grew to incorporate its own hotel chain, airline and money exchange service, went bust last year as it failed to adapt to the new internet age.  It became just the latest casualty in a long catalogue of now disappeared travel companies dating back to the sad demise of Laker Airways in 1982 (the company had a package tour operation but was most famous for offering trans-Atlantic flights from Gatwick to New York and Toronto amongst other destinations for next to nothing - the company expanded too quickly and was forced out of business by a raft of cost cutting on shared routes by better capitalised national carriers like British Airways, Pan-American and Air Canada).

The seismic event that changed travel forever is one probably every adult in the world remembers. It rivals the assassination of JFK and the death of Diana Princess of Wales in its earth shattering suddenness and impact.  Tuesday, 11th September 2001 was a fine late summer day in Warsaw, where I was then living and working.  In New York, there were cloudless skies and temperatures in the mid 20s. George W. Bush was 8 months into his first Presidential term and was visiting a primary school in Florida.  My mates and I came back from lunch and a Dutch colleague booted up CNN on his laptop.  "Look at this," he said.  "There's a plane hanging out of the World Trade Centre."  We gathered round, expecting to see a Cessna or something - not the tail of Boeing 767.   In silence, we watched transfixed and horrified as events unfolded, and a quarter of an hour later a second 767 boomed over head and straight into the second Tower.  The entire bank was silent, watching similar pictures on other networks.  No more work was done that day.  We all left quietly, not talking, and drifted home.  I arrived at my apartment and switched on the tv before even putting my bag down or taking off my shoes - just in time to see both Towers crumble and fall in clouds of smoke, dust and debris.  In front of a global live television audience probably numbering in the billions, a total 2,977 innocent people died and over 25,000 suffered injuries, many life-changing.

You all know the story, so I will say no more.  But in the aftermath, every airport in the world, large and small, that handled commercial flights introduced increasingly stringent security measures.  I flew back to London the next day for some business meetings, and the security at Warsaw airport, then usually strict at the best of times, was noticeably tighter as the police and border security guards were augmented by armed troops.  Heathrow too had increased policing using officers armed with guns rather than truncheons.  It was the same everywhere, and if at first unnerved we soon adapted and became used to it.  We all recognised that if al Quaeda (or for that matter any other terrorist organisation) could do something like that in the States then nowhere was safe.  So the security measures, as they were rolled out, were accepted - they were temporary, after all.

Only they weren't.  More than 20 years later, they are still in force, and the steady rise of Islamic fundamentalism and its allied terrorist attacks, have guaranteed they are here to stay.  No-one bats and eyelid at having to walk through body scanners as they enter the departure areas after check-in, with their hand-baggage on the conveyor belt next to them as it passes through the x-ray machine.  No-one minds taking off coats and jackets, watches and belts, and in some cases shoes.  It's all part of the normal boarding process nowadays.  The time when you could drive to your local airport - in my case, Gatwick in the early 1970s - on a Saturday evening and mingle with passengers and enjoy a few beers in the Starlight Lounge overlooking the apron, just for something to do, will never come back.  It's history.  It's a shame.  If anything, unless or until IS and murderous organizations like it are destroyed, it will get worse, tighter, rather than more relaxed.  For this seasoned global traveller, much of the fun has gone out of flying, never to return.

And now we seem for be facing a fourth game-changer in my longish life.  The first three months of this year, we have been battling a thing called Coronavirus, coded COVID-19.  It appeared somehow in Wuhan,, China, apparently fairly close to a chemical weapons establishment but its origins were traced simply to a typical Chinese market where live birds and animals are kept and slaughtered next to dead ones....conditions ripe for nature to do its worst.  Nevertheless conspiracy theories abound and the internet is awash with them.  Last week, Amazon took down several thousand books, some novels and some claiming to be histories and exposes of the affair, that have been written and posted via its Kindle Publishing arm.  (Quite how anyone could write a readable, never mind accurate, book in the few short weeks since COVID-19 came to light is beyond me.)

Since it came to light, there have been nearly 200,000 cases of infection and over 7,000 fatalities.  The vast majority of people only have mild cases, not unlike flu, and recover quickly, and equally a big majority of deaths are in people aged over 60, generally with pre-existing medical conditions like lung disease, HIV/AIDS and so on.  But the affects of this spread seem to far exceed the numbers themselves - many have pointed out that more people die globally every year from ordinary flu, and many more each day from cancers, tuberculosis and the like.  Indeed, out of a global population in excess of 8billion, the numbers are insignificant - unless you're one of them.

Cities, regions and entire countries are basically quarantining themselves to prevent the spread.  Stock markets the world over are plummeting every day - all the gains made after the 2008 financial crisis (in the wake of Lehman's collapse) were wiped off Wall Street in a single day last week.  Oil prices are collapsing amid a row between Saudi Arabia (OPEC) and Russia (non-OPEC).  Schools and universities are closed, as are museums, art galleries and other places of entertainment.  In many countries, meetings of more than a certain number of people (from 10 to 1000 depending on country) are banned.  Football competitions and Formula 1 are suspended, the Euro 2020 tournament (June) and Tokyo Olympics (July) seriously in doubt.  And there is panic buying everywhere with the most popular good being not tinned food and milk but toilet rolls - shelves are emptied as fast as they can be stacked.  It is insane.

What, you may say, has this pandemic (as it is now classed by the WHO) got to do with travel?  Well, with closed borders people simply cannot go anywhere except under the strictest scrutiny.  Here in Poland the land borders were effectively closed last week, and now airports too are closed - the only flights arriving and departing are repatriation flights.  Anyone trying to cross the border from, say, Germany will be first, checked as to whether they may be carrying the virus, and second, nationality - only Poles or those with proof of permanent residence will be allowed in (those giving a positive test will be quarantined).  The same is happening to various degrees in countries as far apart as Italy and Indonesia, the States and Singapore.  It seems to be working, in that the infection numbers are falling in some places (and rising in others where the virus has arrived later, like the UK).

Because people are not travelling, airlines are taking significant financial hits. Regional carrier flyBE, in Britain, went bust a week or so back, and there are many others including some of the major players in danger of following them.  BA, Virgin, RyanAir and easyJet are asking for UK government support and grounding entire fleets of aircraft as well as laying off staff.  Cathay Pacific in Hong Kong is working to get staff to take 6 weeks (unpaid) leave to ease the financial burden by passing it on to the staff - I'll leave you to decide whether that is reasonable or not.  Other airlines are taking similar steps.  Even Lufthansa is cancelling 75% of its flights and laying people off temporarily, while at the same time complaining that Poland's LOT is receiving unfair government aid for its purchase of Lufthansa rival Condor (part of the collapsed Thomas Cook group) - it isn't: the government aid is in the form of loans at market rates rather than grants as Lufthansa says.  (The Germans also say the take-over is "bad for the environment" - probably because the planes will be using Polish aviation fuel rather than German....).

Hotel booking are down in pretty much every resort, and there will undoubtedly be closures in this sector too.....more jobs lost and another hit to economies like Italy's, Spain's and Greece's that are already in trouble.  There is talk of a global recession, and with people having less money to spend, once the COVID Crisis is over, or at least eased, they are more likely to take "staycations" - holidays at home - especially since the spread of infection is not consistent everywhere.  China is almost clear, Italy where China was in February, the UK and US perhaps a month behind Italy.  The likelihood seems to be that the crisis is going to run throughout this year - a usable vaccination will probably not be available until summer 2021 unless testing is shortened (which is highly unlikely).

It seems to me that by the end of this year the travel industry will be markedly different to how it is now.  There WILL be airline failures, some of them major carriers.  There WILL be many hotels, resorts, campsites and all the other places we use going out of business..  Tourist destinations like Paris and Amsterdam, Barcelona and New York and Thailand are already feeling the pain, and it will only get worse.  When things improve, it remains to be seen how quickly people will be prepared to leave the relative safety of their own country (where conditions are well known) and travel to another place where the situation may not be as clear.  Even with people taking that risk - as they surely will in time - it remains to be seen whether the surviving airlines and hotels and resorts can cope with the numbers.  Let's say, for the sake of argument, that both RyanAir and easyJet go belly up: will carriers like BA and Lufthansa and Swiss, themselves damaged financially and in resources, be able to take up the slack?  If not, how long will it take to rebuild and at what cost?

 The cruise industry, too, has been hit.  For a while a cruise liner that docked in Yokohama had the worst position after China in terms of infections, as the entire crew and passenger manifest (over 3,000 people) were held in quarantine on board for over two weeks.  Another ship with a similar number of passengers was held in open seas off California as the city was reluctant to accept their docking.  In both cases, there several hundred passengers and crew subsequently tested positive.  Since then, a number of cruise lines have been forced to cancel trips, for several months ahead, amid concerns that medical facilities are insufficient to cope with this kind of situation, and many customers booked on future cruises have cancelled.  There are suggestions than some companies may also go out of business due to the pandemic.

There has been an argument going on for some time about whether the railways can provide a viable alternative, in these climate conscious days, to air travel.  Certainly train travel is greener than air travel, but it takes so much longer.  A year or two ago, I was forced to travel from Amsterdam to Warsaw by train - it was pleasant enough, but with two train changes it took over 14 hours.  The flight takes less than an hour and a half.  There is some way to go, then.  But I do think, at least for leisure travel, where the train journey could be factored in to the itinerary and include either sleeper services or overnights en-route, that the train could indeed pick up a lot of business.  If this happens, then we are on the way back in time to the early days of air travel, when only the rich or business travel could afford it.  COVID-19 could mean the death knell to low cost carriers, and I for one would not be sorry to see some of them go.

We will see, in a year or two probably.  But there is no doubt these are very interesting and dangerous times.

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FOOTNOTE:  Re-reading and editing this a little under four years later brings home to me just how unsettling, even terrifying, the Pandemic actually was. Later in the year (when this piece was originally written and published on my This World, This Life blog), 2020, I contracted COVID and was quite poorly, another infection in March 2021 almost took my life, and I've struggled with Long Covid ever since.  The virus is still out there, mutating and sometimes flaring up into another outbreak of concern, but the range of vaccines that came on line, quicker than I anticipated, plus enhanced public awareness and personal hygiene, have seen relegated it to almost just another ailment to get through, like flu or the measles.  Whether that is wise or stupid is still unclear....  But we humans are resilient.

Many of the doom-and-gloom prophecies didn't happen, but the travel industry was indeed hit badly.  The only big airline I can think of that went bust was Alitalia, but its planes were airborne again within a few weeks, sporting a new livery and a new name, with continued state support and familiar inefficiencies. None of the larger low-cost carriers went under, and indeed some of them (notably RyanAir and Wizzair) expanded significantly throughout the Pandemic and continue to flourish.  However, there has been an increase, at least within the EU, in train travel, with more sleeper services introduced, and more high speed links and services established, sometimes thanks to state intervention (in Spain and, particularly, France, where domestic flights have been banned if the flight time is less than a couple of hours and, hence, within train travel time).  And long may that continue!