Remote work from travel destinations.
Work-cations are one travel trend that the pandemic started. Workers are saving the PTO (Personal Time Off) and are traveling to locations with their laptops and working from remote locations.
Major Hoteliers are starting to recognize this trend are making workspace, having printers and strong wi-fi available for long distance teleworkers to come and make these travelers feel more at home. Extended stay room packages are up 30% from previous years as this trend takes hold.
Pet Travel,
Millions of people during the pandemic adopted pets. In turn now that folks are starting to travel and get back out there are domestic air travel is going through the roof and very close to pre-pandemic levels.
Those travelers want to take their four-legged friends with them. On Hilton’s Website the pet friendly hotel filter is now one of top 3 used filters.
Car Rentals
The price of car rentals is still pretty high, as well as the stocks for some car rental companies including Budget/Avis. During the pandemic rental car companies sold off a lot of their fleets because of the pandemic not many people were renting and these companies sold these cars off for cash to keep operating.
But once travel started to rebound there were issues with the supply chain where car parts and manufacturing are having car part shortages. This parts and material shortage has caused car inventory to plummet, and car rental companies haven’t been able to replace the stock of cars that they sold off during the early part of the pandemic.
But now we have lots of travelers and folks that want to rent cars but a short supply, which means the supply and demand are out of whack and now so are the prices for car rentals, with no relief in sight as the supply chain issue doesn’t have a fix in sight, at least for the short term. So if you’re looking for a car rental, expect to pay higher prices.
Cruising being picked on by CDC
Despite having some of the strictest protocols in the travel industry. And having over 90% of their travelers being vaccinated which is much higher than the vaccination rate of the country,.
Because of some small breakouts on ships the CDC has issued a Level 4 Travel Health notice that reads “The chance of getting Covid-19 on cruise ships is high because the virus spreads easily between people in close quarters aboard ships.”
The CDC Continued “People should avoid traveling on cruise ships, including river cruises, worldwide, regardless of vaccination status.” CLIA The Cruise Lines International Association responded to the CDC by saying in writing,
“The decision by the CDC to raise the travel level for cruise is particularly perplexing considering the cases identified on cruise ships consistently make up a slim minority of the total population onboard.”
CLIA added “the majority of cases onboard are either asymptomatic or mild in nature, posing little to no burden on medical resources onboard or onshore.”
Finally CLIA concluded that “Cruise ships offer a highly controlled environment with science-backed measures, known testing, and vaccinated levels far above other venues or modes of transportation and travel, and significantly lower incidence rates than land.”
Just to give an example Royal Caribbean restarted cruising June 2021. And they have carried over 1.1 million passengers and only 1,745 passengers tested positive which is less than 1% of their total passengers. We will keep an eye out as the CDC’s conditional sailing order for cruising expires in January 2022.
Sports and Travel Blogger for The Narrative Matters