Alan Glen, council member and past president of the Scottish Passenger Agents’ Association, said of the introduction of the managed quarantine: "We acknowledge that public health is the overriding concern for everyone in Scotland and beyond, and that prospects for foreign travel will be extremely limited in the short- and medium-term.
"However, the whole travel sector is on its knees and we are asking once again, with a collective voice, for a proactive route map from the Scottish and UK governments for how the travel sector can navigate out of this current situation and move towards meaningful recovery.”
He continued: "Scotland needs its connectivity. As a small nation we need our flight routes to enable us to do business with the rest of the world. By reactively cutting off this connectivity, and by having different requirements in both Scotland and England for managed quarantine, there is currently no strategic view on how we can plan for recovery.
"It’s important to remember that outbound and inbound tourism are co-dependent. Outbound travellers are worth around £1.5 billion to the Scottish economy and inbound tourism is worth around £2.5 billion.
“How can Scotland make an economic recovery from this pandemic if we are happy to cut off these sums of money? Once we stop routes we risk losing them, and once we lose them we may never get them back.
“Staycations have been mooted as a tourism lifeline, but It’s unlikely that Scots alone will be able to staycation the economy back to these levels. We urgently need a route map."
