Sand, palm trees, sunshine – this is not only a dream, but also a commodity. And as such, long-distance travel has encountered a crisis as the pandemic reduced the world to numbers: incidences, reproductive levels and new infections. You could no longer travel to Vietnam, Bali or Australia. If you wanted to go to Thailand, you needed good nerves, India travelers were considered gamblers. The higher earners stayed at home, had a new kitchen installed – or saved.
But now that the third pandemic winter is coming, with high infection rates, heating costs and fear of war, more travelers are planning their trip into the warm to escape the outside and maybe also the inside cold. Therefore, a competition has broken out for the raw material “tourists”, fewer and fewer hurdles have to be overcome if you want to travel to Southeast Asia, a vaccination certificate is usually enough. In May 2022, the Asian Development Bank published an estimate that the travel industry accounts for around 10 percent of gross domestic product in Vietnam, Singapore and Malaysia, and between 20 and 25 percent in Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines.
The message from the German Travel Association (DRV), which reported on Wednesday that tourist bookings for winter 2022/2023 were significantly higher than in the previous year, quickly spread to the region. According to the flight data analysis company Cirium, flights to Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia have already reached pre-pandemic levels in the summer – and with increased prices. According to the Federal Statistical Office, tickets were up to 12.5 percent more expensive in Germany in the travel month of August than in the previous year. However, the so-called snowbirds, who used to be able to afford a few weeks of summer in winter, are now exactly the target group who can also spend a little more money.
In this context, since last year there has been talk of “revenge tourism” – travel as revenge. Only: revenge on what? In China, where the mess started and where people are still hardly able to travel because the return quarantine is still difficult? Of Russia, where few tourists come from because paying with rubles has become tedious? Perhaps the term means more of a retrieval: of experiences and relaxation. Whether that works, however, also depends on a new post-pandemic term: the “Great Resignation” – the great wave of layoffs that also swept Southeast Asia.
In the aviation industry alone, there were about 50 percent fewer jobs at the end of 2021 than before 2019. Millions of workers in the tourism industry have migrated away from the low-wage sector, the maids and T-shirt sellers, the barmaids and massage therapists. Some of them have returned to their families in the countryside, where they are waiting to see whether the economic recovery will last. And living there isn’t that bad compared to Manila, Mumbai or Bangkok, where you often don’t earn much more from the tourists than you need to survive. So maybe this is the real revenge: to stop working in tourism.