In a move aimed at reducing the ongoing disruptions caused by the surge in post-pandemic travel and staff shortages, London’s Heathrow Airport has capped the number of daily passengers through September 11th to 100,000 passengers per day. Read the rest of this entry »

With travel restrictions still in place for many international destinations, along with a desire to avoid or escape dense populations in cities, outdoor itineraries within the U.S. are holding greater appeal as pandemic fears start to fade. 

A recent study by ValuePenguin looked at national park and monument visitation to see which parks saw the most and least visitors, and which ones are on the road to recovery.

Key findings:

• National parks in 2021 reclaimed 91% of their 2019 pre-pandemic visitation. Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida was the big winner with a 154% increase in visits: nearly 2.6 million in 2021, versus roughly 1 million in 2019.
• As pandemic fears faded, national park visitors stayed longer. While visitorship in 2021 was down 9% from 2019, the number of hours spent at national parks was down only 5%.
• But not all parks fared the same during the early portion of the pandemic. Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Alaska saw a drop in visitors from more than 1.1 million in 2019 to only 297 — yes, 297 — in 2020.
• Urban parks, monuments and memorials typically have seen the slowest recoveries. Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, Boston National Historic Park and the Statue of Liberty National Park in New York all ranked in the bottom five for percentage change in visitors between 2019 and 2021.

View full report: https://www.valuepenguin.com/national-parks-study

Like Girl Scouts who are always prepared, travel advisors know that a successful vacation often comes down to having a backup plan. So when Lene Minyard of Perfectly Planned Journeys gathered a group of insiders earlier this month to come up with ideas to help travel recover, it’s no surprise they proposed a Plan B—for their own businesses, for their customers, and for the industry as a whole.

The discussion began, of course, with concerns over the present situation. “There’s a lot of new blood coming into the industry; they are coming in by the droves,” said The Travel Institute’s Guida Botelho. “We get 8-10 new people every single day. And we have a responsibility to educate and empower and propel these people forward.”

But for new advisors—and for the thousands of travel advisors already in business—it’s almost impossible to keep up with the changing regulations of every supplier and destination. And of course, there’s the Damocles sword: the better job you do and the more information you share with clients, the greater your liability if you say the wrong thing.

“We need more training on being a business owner, on defining the advisor’s role in the midst of the pandemic,” said TRUE Global Network vice president Margie Jordan. “When you make it your burden [to give clients information], it becomes your liability. Where do we draw the line? What is our duty of Read the rest of this entry »

After a year of being pent up, the Great Release is upon us, and now it seems sudden. Things are opening faster than predicted just a few months ago.

In March 2020, the COVID pandemic submerged us in the exponential growth of new infections and, before we could comprehend what was happening, we were virtually imprisoned, taking shelter to save our lives. We settled in and got used to being confined. Now the release is happening all around us. And it seems to be happening faster than almost anyone expected.

The demand for travel is, unsurprisingly, going through the roof. But to say “it’s complicated” is to vastly understate the circumstances. World travel now is an extremely tangled web. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, in an article on ATI-DriveAmerica, TRO posted a video produced by Clayton Reid, the CEO of MMGY Global. The presentation is an important, clearly stated, and credible explanation of not only the current status of the travel industry, but also regarding the likely path of the road to recovery. Read the rest of this entry »