A travel expert has claimed that we have twelve weeks to save the 2021 holiday season.
The current coronavirus restrictions advise against all non-essential travel outside of Ireland, but the arrival of vaccines offers some hope foreign trips could return.
And Eoghan Corry from Travel Extra said that we will know by Easter whether we will get our summer holidays this year – and it all depends on the rollout of the jabs.
He explained: “The most important thing will be the consumer confidence. It won’t be airlines or Government policies that decide when people will travel again, it will be the consumer.
“For that to happen again we will need a good run of luck in terms of the vaccine rollout, that people buy into it, are comfortable with it and know its working, not just in Ireland but wherever we’re going.
“What we’ve seen is confidence built up over the summer while rates are low, and then fell apart, particularly in the last couple of weeks.
“So we need things to happen, probably by St Patrick’s Day, but certainly by Easter.
“There isn’t a big window of time before things can start moving again. If by July and August things start coming together it’s going to be too late for people to get their act together, because hotels are closed, planes are in the wrong place, recertifying an aircraft to get it back in the sky takes ages.
“Ireland will do a bit better than that because Ryanair are keeping their aircrafts certified and their pilots certified, so they’re in a position to move quickly, but most European countries aren’t.
“Even if the return of confidence gets delayed past Easter, and it goes into June and July, that means the big places we like to go, in our case Spain and Portugal, won’t be able to get their product together on the ground to be able to cope with crowds.
“So it has to be early, I think we have about twelve weeks to save 2021.”
Eoghan also addressed the possibility of a “vaccine passport” – which could take a form similar to the current Yellow Fever passport.
He continued: “I don’t know how likely it is, but a lot could go wrong. We have to set a standard for every country, and you end with, say, the Chinese saying it has to be a Chinese vaccine, and the European’s saying it has to be Pfizer not AstraZeneca, for example.
“What the international aviation industry wants to do is have the equivalent of the yellow fever passport for travelling to Africa. They want one of those to say I’ve been vaccinated for Covid and it will be digital on your phone on your boarding pass, everyone will see you’ve been vaccinated.
“But we’re a long way off the internal agreements to allow that to happen and the technology to allow that to happen.
“Now that could change. I’m surprised by the speed of the vaccine into the market. It could be the urgency of getting that process is sped up it does look like we will have no agreed process on vaccinations, or even tests, by summer.
“That will just be a mish mash of problems for anyone trying to travel or anyone trying to plan travel such as an agency or an airline.”
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