At the halfway mark we can predict better what it’s all going to look like when we’re vaccinated at the beginning of next year. I do this specially wondering what my own industry, distant travel, will look like. Frankly it shouldn’t be much different for anyone in any endeavor.
Americans are different – quite different – from other nationalities. We’ve been hit the worst and we’ve handled it the worst. There will be special hurdles for us that others will avoid.
Forced into reflection by our virus winter, travelers are having second thoughts about what travel means to their lives.
A surprising transformation is occurring. Owning up to the fantasies of their trips and faced with a future economy that doesn’t look all that good cost is becoming more important than ever.
Reopening is a contentious topic. Loosening the rules for dining out, for example, is an explosive issue as much in New York as Nairobi. Not just personal freedom and sanity, but for the large part of the economy on which dining is based.
But get real folks, not for vacation travel.
I’m betting that a vaccine will be ready by the first of the year and that Kenya, South Africa and a number of other sub-Saharan countries will require all travelers to prove they are vaccinated in order to gain entry.
But what will you find once you get in?
Lions hunt because they’re hungry, and I’ve often listened to excited clients posit why a pair of fit hunters just missed a take-down: They were “too desperate.” I smile wanly to myself. Wild animals’ every moment is one of desperation.
Never, though, has any lion displayed the level of desperation found today among African safari companies trying to survive this virus. We knew many wouldn’t make it. We didn’t know it would be suicide.
You can’t travel for a year.
Nothing is available to suggest an older person will feel comfortable traveling very far from her home until she’s vaccinated against Covid-19, and Spring 2021 is likely the earliest this will happen. But once that sunrise arrives, you better be well prepared for what the fields will look like.
This is the final in a series of three blogs about managing your travel in the era of Covid-19. To fully understand these recommendations about your future travel, please carefully read first the previous two blogs.
American’s travel dollars are at greater risk than likely any other investments they hold. This is the first of three blogs explaining why and what to do in the era of Covid-19.
I’m going out on a limb, here, so it’s important that you follow my reasoning so that you can perceive its weaknesses and let me know. I’m as anxious as any traveler to find the looking-glass.
This first blog explains why these dollars are at such a risk and always have been. Tomorrow’s blog does my best at projecting when travel might be possible, again, and what other parts of the world – particularly Africa – will look like. And Wednesday’s blog will give my recommendations on what to do.
All South African Airways flights for the next two days have been cancelled. A two-day strike which is unlikely to be resolved could continue indefinitely.
In today’s big, interconnected world, only big carriers make good business sense. That’s why South African Airways is about to implode and fail.
Almost all the greatest explorations from Europe into Africa began with Mssrs. Thomas Cook, a group of brothers and friends who were the precursor to the Thomas Cook Travel company that went bust this weekend.
Mssrs. Cook et al would be contacted with little more than the explorers’ avowed itinerary: for example, “I’m going down The Nile” or “to find a big mountain in Abyssinia.”
As I see it it’s unbridled capitalism really giving us a headache, now, and I’ve got a whopper of a story to tell you.
I’m guiding ten people in a few weeks to Botswana. The Botswana aircraft company that we use to get from camp to camp has described exactly the type of suitcases that we can’t bring, because they claim it can’t be safely stored in the plane’s belly.
Meanwhile down the line in Johannesburg (through which we have to fly to get to Botswana) airport authorities have told us that type of bag is exactly the ONLY type of suitcase that their employees will handle!
Such nonsense doesn’t happen when the times are such that “customers are always right” and everybody is vying for everybody else’s business. But that’s not the moment.
I know we’re headed into a global recession so I’m absolutely amazed that the employees and managers and representatives of safari companies in southern Africa are so blind to what’s crashing into them in just a few months that they are flaunting customer stress.
They’re all acting as if the customer can’t be right and should be foiled at every attempt to be so. For the last several years safari bookings have been at near all-time highs. I can imagine the difficulties and frustrations that poses the types of small companies which provide safari services.
But they don’t have to take it out on us!
We gave both the Botswana company, Desert ‘n Delta Safaris, and the Joburg airport authorities advance warning of this blog and asked them for comment. Neither did so.
The details actually are interesting. In the last decade there have been an unusual number of small plane crashes in Botswana. For some reason, as vibrant a tourist industry as Botswana has, their charter aircraft industry remains in the dark ages.
Like much of Alaska they tend to use very small, old single prop planes. In part this reflects a lack of building proper airstrips but it also reflects greed. The travel industry globally is ridiculously volatile. So in good times when you’d expect enthusiastic investment, it’s just the reverse. Professionals know the heyday will end and never gently. Only in safari country, for example, are investment properties guaranteed a three year R.O.I.
Ditto for planes, I guess. In any case one of the culprits identified (after a very long time and without much study) as the cause of low Botswana air safety was hard-sided luggage. It makes it difficult to pack in the very small bellies of these very small planes.
So, no hard-sided luggage.
In Joburg, meanwhile, the O.R. Tambo International airport has just racked up some of the worst statistics for an airport its size. Among those were delays caused by baggage handlers. According to airport authorities (after little study) one main reason was soft luggage that got caught in automated baggage delivery systems. So now the airport requires at least one side of every piece of luggage to be hard.
So what are we to do?
Naturally, we contacted both parties and advised them of the others’ regulations. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that neither revised their original regulations.
So what are we to do? Well, we really don’t have a choice. We’ll try to comply best we can with the Botswana requests, but we won’t even get to Botswana with our luggage if we don’t first comply with the Joburg requests!
Stay tuned. This should be interesting.
When blood boils you need to take in a very deep breath of crisp, cold air. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since the story broke Sunday of the “rescue” of kidnapped American Kimberly Sue Endicott in Uganda together with her Ugandan guide.
Blood boils with the heat caused by screams no one listens to: I’ve been telling people for years not to visit Uganda and in particular where Endicott was kidnapped. Two young Brits were just kidnapped in that area last year! What’s worse?
To those of you have been insisting Zimbabwe is just fine for tourism, please explain your position to the tourists currently hunkered down in the hotels in Zimbabwe unable to go or come.
Airlines canceled flights, taxis and other transport wouldn’t move tourists from hotels anywhere, and visitors could do nothing but hunker down. No tourists appeared in danger, but this certainly wasn’t the vacation they’d been sold.
A Florida woman canoeing down the Zambezi nearly lost her leg after being attacked by a hippo and undergoing hours of surgery in Johannesburg earlier this week.
Kristen and Ryan Yaldor were celebrating Kristen’s 37th birthday on one of my most favorite trips when I was younger. The guide noticed something unusual to the right, told the couple to paddle to the left, and moments later Kristen was in the mouth of an angry mother hippo.
At the end of six days in two different big game reserves in South Africa each of my two separate groups was beaming. They’d seen leopards, lions, wild dogs, black and white rhino, elephant, honey badger, multiple kinds of antelope … it was a dream come true! They’d seen everything in the wild!
Or had they? Read more
Might this have had something to do with the rush by all the world airlines this morning to waive all fees for changes over very generous time frames?