Troubles in the tourism industry
A look at the impact of the pandemic on tourism around the world.
Depending on the source, you can go out, it’s not safe to go out, wear a mask, don’t wear a mask, and if you have any opinion other than the government’s, you will be banned from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
We were forced to learn how to do many jobs remotely. Teachers had to teach classes via Zoom, corporations had board meetings via Video Chat, and religious groups used the internet to unite.
There are still a few jobs today that cannot be outsourced. People do these jobs and they deal with people.
To fully understand the impact of the virus on our economies, it is important to look at the area most affected by it: Tourism.
Travel GDP for 2019
About 9% of North America’s GDP is generated by tourism-related industries in 2019.
Nearly 8 percent of South America’s GDP is derived from tourism, which employed 17 million people.
Europe had 38 million people working in the field, contributing nearly 10% to its GDP.
Nearly 24 million Africans worked in the field, contributing almost 7% to the continent’s GDP
Nearly 9% of the GDP of the Middle East is provided by 6.9 million people
There are 181 million jobs in the Asian Pacific region, providing nearly 10% of GDP.
Caribbean islands provide 2.8 million jobs, 14% of the island’s GDP, on their own. It can be over 50% on some island nations like Macau
It is not a list of individual countries or cities.
Globally, it’s a pretty big number.
How did the virus affect the tourism industry? Tourism is a pretty standard expense in someone’s GDP.
Before we enter the tourism numbers, let’s just exclude the people in the travel industry who were influenced by this as well.
Losses on landing strips
Around 400,000,000 airline workers were laid off or put on “temporary furlough” for an indeterminate period in the travel industry.
There were more than a million people flying around the world every day before March 15, 2020. You had 95,000 visitors a day within a month.
(In the US, this represents a 96% decline in passengers)
Two thirds of the world’s passenger planes were grounded, according to some estimates.
It’s not like storing a bike when you ground an aircraft. In storage, planes require constant maintenance.
Frequently, planes become inoperable if not maintained. Flight Control Systems and Hydraulics need to be kept lubricated, sometimes animals can build nests in idle engines, creating a whole set of problems.
An estimated 16,000 planes were grounded, with the average sized passenger plane, a Boeing 747, costing slightly more than $4 million, that’s $64 billion just locked up.
Also, where are you going to keep them?
It will take years for the aviation industry to recover. It has been suggested by some economists to tour by vehicle…
My friends and I rarely travel by car when visiting a foreign country…
