Tim Hames, a senior adviser to global consultancy FTI Consulting, warned the industry there were likely to be “intense and potentially tighter limits on travel” until May.
Hames, appearing at the Virtual ITT Conference Forum, said: “The government has come to take a different view of international mobility than in the early stages of the crisis.”
He also thought the government would have cancelled overseas travel in summer 2020, as well as closed travel corridors in late September 2020, with the benefit of hindsight.
“The vaccine is not a get-out-of-jail-free card,” said Hames, adding that three “known unknowns” could shape the summer 2021 holiday season, and the travel industry needed to be prepared to deal with them.
These issues include new mutations of the virus that could be resistant to the vaccines; the potential transmission of new Covid variants by vaccinated Brits who travel abroad to places where vaccines have not been rolled out; as well as the speed of vaccine distribution in key southern European destinations.
Despite this, Hames said there was a “respectable case for optimism” for the summer season, with the situation likely to become clearer in April and May when vaccination programmes are more advanced both in the UK and in key destinations.
“International travel is not automatically doomed for 2021,” he added.
Hames said that Covid was likely to be an issue for the industry for years and the sector had to expect “flare ups” and “many scares about mutations”.
“The industry needs to think collectively about how it deals with these issues,” he urged.
Hames added the travel industry needed to be “far better and much more sophisticated” in how it lobbied politicians and had to improve its understanding of how politics works.
“The industry punches below its weight and it badly needs a vaccine for that,” he said.
