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PETALING JAYA: People are starting to regain confidence in travel and tourists from China will be the first to travel again as the country is almost being freed from the pandemic, says AirAsia Group CEO Tan Sri Tony Fernandes ( Photo).
Chinese tourists are important as they constitute the largest number of tourists traveling around the world before the pandemic.
“I anticipate that Chinese tourists will also fly to Malaysia. Travelers will prefer shorter flights of about four hours as a start.
“AirAsia will benefit because there are many direct flights from Kuala Lumpur to Chinese cities,” he said yesterday in an online interview during the 2020 Global Tourism Economy Forum in Macau.
The interview was conducted by Star Media Group advisor and China Daily Asia Leadership Roundtable advisor Datuk Seri Wong Chun Wai.
Countries like China, Thailand and Malaysia are experiencing strong demand for domestic travel, he said.
“We believe that Asia will be at the forefront of the reopening of the borders.
“I think in June of next year we will start to see more international travel. By February next year, we will see domestic travel return to pre-Covid levels, “he added.
He believes that progress in vaccines, new testing methods, drugs, and the knowledge gained from the pandemic meant there was a beginning to the end. Fernandes said that with steps like wearing masks, air circulation on the plane and hepa filters made it almost impossible for the virus to spread on a plane.
He also said that Covid-19 has ensured that airlines work more closely with airports, who, according to him, had generally been the problem in trying to make things easier in the past.
“Now no airport can block us when we want to do contactless travel. I think it will be easier to fly in the long run, ”he said.
He believes that check-ins, boarding pass printing, and passage through boarding gates would be done using face scans in the near future.
While security queues may still exist, passport queues will be eradicated soon, he added.
As a regional airline, Tony said that AirAsia is in the right space to recover, as the airline does not depend on business travel but on leisure travel.
The company, he added, will work hard to continue to keep fares low, although there are other factors such as tests and vaccinations that can add to the cost of travel overall.
The pandemic has forced the airline to restructure and lose people through no fault of its own, he said.
He compared the situation to a game of snakes and ladders, where he was once in frame 97 but slipped into the third frame due to a snake.
“We will come out stronger but not without a lot of pain from what we’ve been through this year. I always say never waste a crisis, ”he said, adding that he was determined to rehire the staff he had to fire.
While everyone predicts pessimism for the travel and airline industries, Fernandes was optimistic that travel would return in a big way.
“Humans are a tough bunch. We forget as fast as we remember. People need to have free time. To return to.
“After 9/11, everyone said that traveling was dead. But we had the best years of our life after 9/11. It will come back strong and we will make it fly again, ”he said.
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