“I don’t see any evidence that people want to take a holiday on Zoom,” Adonis told TTG Media CEO Daniel Pearce during the Virtual ITT Conference Forum.
“Rumours of the death of our industry are greatly exaggerated,” he insisted, paraphrasing US writer Mark Twain’s famous quote when his obituary was mistakenly printed.
“When vaccination is sufficiently widespread, we can open up. I don’t believe travel patterns are going to change dramatically [from before the pandemic].
“Once the vaccine has been rolled out, behaviour patterns will return, although the transitional pain will be acute.”
But the Labour peer warned the industry not to chase the “fool’s gold” of booking short-term departures while the crisis was ongoing and the vaccination programme was still in its early stages.
Adonis said there was “not much appetite” within parliament to partially open up travel in the same way as during summer 2020.
“The view is that we opened up too much last summer and that led to the very savage lockdown this time,” he added.
“It didn’t work and there’s not much appetite for going through another phase of partially opening up until we get to full vaccination.”
Adonis called for the government to provide a road map out of the current lockdown for the industry and added government engagement with the industry had been “lamentable” throughout the crisis.
“Some of the [government] decisions have been shockingly sudden in terms of regimes for having passengers going through airports,” he added.
Adonis said that projects such as the building of Heathrow’s third runway could also be delayed due to the impact of the pandemic.
