Mon, Feb 21, 2022 page9

• US travel fears fade, as people see Omicron as a ‘golden ticket’

  • By Nikki Ekstein / Bloomberg
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  It is not that Abigail Rogado had not traveled at all since March 2020, but when the founder and chief executive officer of branding consultancy ArtTank had hit the road, she had done it with trepidation.

  “I lost my dad to COVID in the pandemic’s early days,” she said. “It made me more heightened about my precautions. I was really living the hermit life. I didn’t even go outside to take walks for months.”

  Even after COVID-19 cases had declined substantially in autumn last year, Rogado still wore a mask outdoors in New York City, her hometown.

  Then the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 emerged — and everything changed.

  To this day, she has no idea how she came down with COVID-19; she had canceled her holiday plans and barely even gone to the grocery store.

  Now she is planning trips to Costa Rica, Iceland and Paris within the next 90 days.

  Rogado is one of many travelers using a recovery from COVID-19 as a “golden ticket” to get moving, as travel advisers are starting to call it.

  Armed with positive test results and a doctor’s note affirming they have recovered, they are exempt from testing requirements to re-enter the US, thereby abating fears of being stranded, which in many cases is greater than fears of getting sick.

  Given that the provision lasts 90 days from the positive test date, many are treating it as an all-you-can-vacation pass that is fast-tracking the travel industry’s healthy bounce.

  “Our advisers are so busy fielding calls from clients who are feeling Teflon-coated after coming down with Omicron. Some are even planning trips while they’re still in quarantine,” said Misty Belles, vice president of global public relations for Virtuoso, a travel adviser network.

  “It has definitely bolstered those who are being cautious and promoted international travel, opening the possibility for long-haul travel for people who had been timid about it,” Belles said. “For the industry, after having gone through rounds of cancelations and postponements in the thick of the busy holiday season, it’s huge.”

  “I think this is the busiest our agency has ever been,” Embark Beyond travel consultant Laura Worth said. “The floodgates have really opened in the last few weeks. Now the requests are just crazy, crazy, crazy coming in.”

  Nearly 6 million people around the world have died from COVID-19 — and a certificate of recovery from a doctor does not make travelers bulletproof.

  While having had the virus does bolster immunity, studies have shown that it is possible to be reinfected with the same variant; it is also difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to know which variant they have previously contracted. Someone who had Omicron could get sick with an infection of the Delta variant, and vice-versa. They could catch Omicron twice.

  When traveling, this can make for quick community spread, especially if visiting destinations with lower vaccine availability or uptake.

  Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, US travelers are generally less concerned about getting sick than getting stuck, travel agents say.

  The most-cited impediment in booking international trips has been the requirement that travelers obtain a negative COVID-19 test 24 hours (or at least one day) before the return flight departs for the US.

  “With so many clients, there is this constant tug of war between feelings of ‘I hope,’ and ‘what if,’” Worth said. “People are still worried about whether things are cancelable, about planning for evacuations. There’s an edge.”

  Still, there is more relief in the conversation, she added.

  “It’s the release of the fear of being stuck, more than anything,” she said.

  Some clients are surprised to hear, in the face of that liberation, that they cannot carry out their wildest travel fantasies.

  “You have to remind people that they can’t just visit their friends in Hong Kong [where the border remains closed to tourists] or pick up and go to Chile [where there are still difficult-to-navigate restrictions],” Worth said. “But you remind them, and then they remember: ‘Oh, right.’ That’s still a thing.”

  With “golden ticket” in hand, these newly energized travelers are going out of the box with vacations far more than their risk-averse peers.

  Some are planning itineraries to see the Taj Mahal without crowds; others are swapping their easy US Virgin Islands getaways for a quick trip to Cartagena, Colombia, or Buenos Aires.

  For families with young children, it can mean the freedom to get back on a plane rather than exploring exclusively within a drivable radius.

  For John Walsh, the founder of electric vehicle maker Endera Motors, pandemic-era travel has been inescapable.

  “I travel for work constantly,” he said, speaking from his company’s factory in Ohio. “I’m on a plane every other week and have been for the last two years, mostly flying domestically.”

  Knowing that he had developed antibodies amid an Omicron wave in December last year, emboldened him to travel differently.

  “It changed my behavior to an extent. I knew I’d be healthy, and I could live my life and not live in fear, which is where a lot of people are living these days,” he said.

  Walsh planned a blowout holiday trip to Tulum, Mexico, where on New Year’s Eve he attended a packed music festival at the Papaya Playa Project.

  “It was no masks, no restrictions on distance, just a bunch of people enjoying New Year’s with crazy music — and that was the fun of it,” he said.

  On other nights, he went to bars and nightclubs to live it up.

  “I’m scaling my company. For the rest of my 90 days, I’m head-down with work,” he said. “That was the perfect timing to go big.”

  Visits to farther-flung destinations are also on the uptick, as travelers who remain cautious about exposure to crowds worry less about the quality of local healthcare.

  Among them is retail store owner Harold Dweck, who had high hopes of planning a big family trip for two weeks last month, when his kids were off from school — something special enough to make up for multiple years of canceled vacations.

  “We were down to two choices,” he said. “It was either Costa Rica or South Africa, but my wife kept worrying, asking: ‘What if we’re in Africa and one of us gets COVID?’ We didn’t know how it would affect us,” he said. “Trying to get medical attention when you’re somewhere remote on safari? It was concerning.”

  The debate stretched from August until mid-December last year, when Dweck came down with mild symptoms. Within two weeks, nearly his whole household tested positive.

  “Once we had the letter from our doctor saying we were healthy again, it was much easier to make a decision,” he said.

  With 10 days to spare, he called his travel agent and booked a trip to stay at Royal Malewane and Singita Lebombo in South Africa’s Kruger National Park area.

  “We had the places to ourselves; it felt like the safest place to be,” said Dweck, who added that the trip “was our most amazing vacation ever.”

  “On a sunset drive, we stopped in the middle of the bush. They took out for us a beautiful spread of food and drinks, and I just sat in a chair watching my wife and kids taking pictures and hugging each other,” he said. “Nobody was on their cellphones. Nobody was trying to figure out what their friends were doing. They were just enjoying the moment.”

  A rise in business for hard-hit regions such as sub-Saharan Africa — where it is not typically possible to plan last-minute trips — would be one silver lining of the Omicron wave.

  The freedom these diagnoses afford travelers might benefit everyone across the industry, consumers included.

  “That vacation you took in 2019? It’s going to cost you 30 percent to 40 percent more in 2022,” Belles said, citing higher airfares and hotel prices.

  Some of that has to do with demand compression: By and large, travelers have been willing to commit to travel only on short notice, often amid the safety net of lower case volumes.

  “Now, people are starting to book further out, even into summer,” she said. “For the industry, it’s an exciting development.”

  Worth said that the business has come as a relief after December brought swells of cancelations, which added to industry-wide losses that have likely exceeded US$4 trillion throughout the pandemic.

  More important, she said that the Omicron wave — and the droves of people who feel immune after catching it — would be the key to returning normalcy to how people travel.

  “It’s been interesting to see how governments have changed their policies amid Omicron,” she said. “This variant went so far and so fast, it really challenged the idea that pre-arrival testing can prevent spread.”

  “It will end up being a great thing for the economy and the industry for countries such as the UK to throw out the testing requirements and just say: ‘If you’re vaccinated, come,’” she added. “We have to normalize it somehow, and if Omicron does that — well, in a backward sense, it may have been a great gift.”
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