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KUALA LUMPUR (BLOOMBERG) – This Sunday (November 22), the post-Covid era of travel will begin at Hong Kong and Singapore airports. Two hundred passengers, previously tested for the virus, will board flights in each city to the other. Upon arrival, they will be tested again. If negative, they can roam freely, without having to undergo the two-week quarantines required for other travelers.
It is the first known Covid travel bubble in the world, and the devastated global tourism industry has pinned its hopes on a successful implementation. Unfortunately, even if the experiment works, it won’t herald the return of anything like the open-air culture of pre-pandemic life. Instead, it will likely signal a recently rare and expensive travel era, one that is highly unlikely to support an industry that relies on cheap flights.
It is no coincidence that this experiment is happening in Asia-Pacific. For two decades, air travel has expanded faster here than anywhere else. In 2010, 15.9 million people visited Thailand; In 2019, 39.8 million visited it, more than two-thirds of them from Asia.
Few of those travelers arrived in a first-class cabin. Instead, his Thai beach vacation was mostly helped by the explosive growth of low-cost airlines. That had an immense effect on tourist flows: from 2011 to 2018, weekly flights between China and Thailand increased from 200 to 1,300, while the proportion of those flying on a low-cost airline skyrocketed from 4% to 44%. %. All those bargains were stopped this year thanks to Covid.
In Thailand, foreign visitors for 2020 are expected to decline by a whopping 83 percent, with the majority of arrivals occurring before closing. Other countries face similar shocks in their travel and tourism industries. Low-cost airlines, which rely on volume to compensate for low margins, are among the worst hit.
From the early days of the pandemic, “travel bubbles” were proposed as a solution to this devastation. But configuring them turned out to be much more difficult than expected. In Asia, where countries have been much more successful in controlling the pandemic, there is an understandable reluctance to open up.
However, even in places where interest is strong, the practical difficulties of agreeing to seemingly simple matters, such as standards tests, have set things back. Despite such impediments, Hong Kong and Singapore have managed to reach what appears to be a viable agreement. The deep economic connections between the two cities (13,654 flights between them in 2019) certainly helped.
Demand also appears to be strong. During the opening week, in which there will only be one daily “bubble flight”, seats are already sold out. However, it won’t be cheap. Even economy class seats cost more than $ 800 (Singapore $ 1,074), far more than an equivalent ticket before the pandemic. And that won’t be the only premium attached to a bubble flight. Detecting Covid alone could cost up to $ 600 roundtrip.
Additionally, travelers who test positive are expected to pay the bill for treatment and quarantine in the destination city.
For all that, a travel bubble is no guarantee against infection. Last week, a Caribbean cruise ship sailed for the first time since the industry was shut down in March. Despite extensive precautions, including multiple tests for everyone on board, seven passengers and two crew members tested positive within days after the ship left port. The trip was quickly aborted and the company canceled the rest of its cruises for 2020.
The Singapore-Hong Kong bubble could survive such an outbreak, but there isn’t much room for error. Under the agreement reached between the two cities, if either destination, both home to millions, records an average of seven days of five or more unrelated Covid cases, the bubble will be suspended.
Despite the risks, it is clear that there are many people willing to take the risk of getting back on the air. But the additional costs, financial and otherwise, suggest that bubbles are simply not the answer to the travel industry’s problems, not in Asia or elsewhere. As with so many aspects of life affected by Covid, only one vaccine will get things back to normal.
• Adam Minter is an opinion columnist for Bloomberg. He is the author of Junkyard Planet: Travels In The Billion-Dollar Trash Trade and Secondhand: Travels In The New Global Garage Sale.
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