Global tourism industry in 2022 and beyond
The pandemic decimated the global travel industry virtually overnight. Travel restrictions due to the virus outbreak resulted in a staggering 98% drop in international tourist arrivals in May 2020 compared to the same month the previous year. And things only slightly improved since then— the first quarter of 2021 saw a drop of 83% . The World Tourism Organization disclosed on Tuesday that international travel went down by seventy per cent in the first eight months of 2020 because of the pandemic, but it has predicted that this number will bounce back. However, this won’t happen until the second last quarter of 2021 because of the many travel restrictions related to the pandemic. The real movement will only begin in the year 2022. Towards the end of 2020, as the number of cases started reducing, people who were stuck at home for more than nine months started going out. “But now, what mattered more was the hygiene and the crowd at hotels rather than the complimen...