LET’S face it, there’s just no killing the human desire to travel. Look at all the conditions around travel these days and all the news about rising infections, and you’d be surprised there are still people travelling – people finding ways to get around the restrictions.
It’s amazing to see their resourcefulness. Today, I spoke to a friend in Mexico City who’s flying to Houston to get her vaccination and then she’ll fly to Amsterdam for a month on a job stint. I have a friend in Singapore who’s flying to Los Angeles and then onto Hawaii where he’ll spend two-three months on a workation. “Who knows what the world will be like by then, I’ll worry about it then,” he said.
Someone asked me this week with the opening of Samui, why are there flights from Singapore to Samui when people can’t travel? Technically, we in Singapore can leave but we may find it hard to return – there’s a two-week quarantine on return and you don’t get to choose your hotel, and if you’re not a citizen or permanent resident you may not be able to return.
My social media feeds are once again filled with friends posting from their travels. Oh look, she made it to Mexico. Oh look, he’s in Lisbon. I never thought I’d be so happy to be scrolling through other people’s travel photos. “Flying to Croatia this weekend, and then to France till mid-September,” another said.
I like this new consumer trend of longer stays, slower travel.
Look at the rules around the Phuket Sandbox. Many sceptics had said, who’d want to travel with these rules and yet, the numbers are trickling in and the stays are getting longer. Not a flood, by any means, but then no one in Phuket really wanted a rush.
As Ho Kwon Ping, executive chairman of Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts, said in this interview, Phuket is like a patient who’s been in a coma for nearly two years – you need time to relearn all those things you took for granted to welcome tourists again. No one involved in it wants a big surge right away, he said.
Ho, who was on his way to Phuket to spend a week on the island, reminded us of the significance of the Phuket Sandbox. He calls it a historic occasion. “Every single country in Asia, east of the Maldives, and west of Hawaii, has been locked down – a place where hundreds of millions of people have not been able to visit each other. Phuket is the only place, an experiment, where vaccinated travellers can visit each other.”
And he said if it worked, it can become a model for other countries to have their own Sandboxes – Penang in Malaysia, Bali in Indonesia, Phu Quoc in Vietnam and even Tasmania in Australia.
“It is not a panacea but you do create a viable way by which some degree of tourism can be revived and you create a way for foreigners to do it in a painless way,” he said.
For him, success of Phuket Sandbox is not about the immediate numbers. He said, “It is clearly a success if at some point in time, it gives a way for travellers to get to the rest of Thailand safely and there’s a return to normalcy gradually, even if takes a long time. If we can reach 50-60% occupancy by year end, I’d call it incredibly successful.”
Sheer vigilance and snuffing out problems right away is critical to ensuring the Sandbox stays open, he said. “Look at Singapore, one of the most vigilant places, and then we had the KTV cluster.”
He said there could be temporary stops if infections get beyond a certain point and there could be reinfections but when you have 70% vaccinated residents (as in Phuket) and 100% vaccinated foreign arrivals, then “reinfection is nothing more than a statistic”.
He is also optimistic that when Singapore gets to 70% of its population vaccinated (which it aims to do so by August 9, National Day), it could be conceivable that the government would reduce the quarantine for vaccinated residents to one week if they travel to medium-risk countries.
Well, we share his hope and he certainly sounded upbeat in the radio interview – why wouldn’t he be when he’s off to Phuket where Banyan Tree has its resorts there?
See, when it comes to the desire to travel, KP Ho is just like us, he’s been chafing at the bit like us to get out there – and as we in Singapore settle back into Phase 2 conditions (I’ve forgotten what part of what phase we are in because we keep going back and forth), we can only cling to the hope that it’s always darkest before the dawn.
And out there is a road that will lead us out of here because the “animal spirits” in us are ready to burst out of the gates, and even if the gates remain blocked in some way or other, we will find a way to get out of here – as the numbers of people still travelling amid a pandemic attest to.
An IATA survey this week said that while travellers were frustrated with rules and the accompanying paperwork to travel, they remain adamant about wanting to travel. “Almost two thirds of respondents plan to resume travel within a few months of the pandemic being contained (and borders opened). And by the six-month mark almost 85% expect to be back to travel,” said Willie Walsh, IATA president.
• Featured image credit: Banyan Tree Phuket
