Trying to understand where the market will go from here. How will travel change — especially short-term travel. Do you think business-travel segment will grow? Or is there another segment that the likes of Airbnb will have to explore in the post-covid world.
All of these "post-covid world" predictions assume a long term risk of the virus with the consequential measures.
I suspect that this is overblown and that we'll probably go back to normal in the short term (i.e. some time next year, probably, or in 2022).
We have been continuously fighting virii and diseases for billions of years. We have been through large scale epidemics of appaling diseases many, many times with sometimes double digit percentage points decrease in population. Result? The worls as it was in 2019. So I'm skeptical that Covid-19 will have consequences even just on par with the Spanish flu of 1918-1819. In teerms of global health AIDS has had a massively bigger impact (maybe 30 million+ deaths and counting).
The biggest impact of Covid-19 may be political because of the social consequences of the massive hit on the economy cause by widespread lockdowns.
Bottom line, travel will most likely resume as before. We're already seeing the beginning of that in Europe. If restrictions remain my guess is that they will be for environmental reasons (but perhaps implemented using Covid-19 as a pretext).
Unless the response to, or impact of, Covid-19 leads to exogenous circumstances (e.g. massive global economic depression, unprecedented levels of global political coordination resulting in aggressive carbon emissions reduction targets, etc.) that somehow transform the travel landscape, I would expect existing trends to resume once the Covid-19 situation resolves.
Assuming we get back to “normal” in the next year or so, it seems to me that, with regard to business travel specifically, there’s a tension at play between technology that increasingly enables asynchronous, location-independent collaboration and increasing global economic integration as new markets enter the fray.
My position is: it will be not a "post-COVID world". I believe that all kinds of travels will be slowly coming back but it will be totally another procedure, vibes, and safety issue.
I suspect that this is overblown and that we'll probably go back to normal in the short term (i.e. some time next year, probably, or in 2022).
We have been continuously fighting virii and diseases for billions of years. We have been through large scale epidemics of appaling diseases many, many times with sometimes double digit percentage points decrease in population. Result? The worls as it was in 2019. So I'm skeptical that Covid-19 will have consequences even just on par with the Spanish flu of 1918-1819. In teerms of global health AIDS has had a massively bigger impact (maybe 30 million+ deaths and counting).
The biggest impact of Covid-19 may be political because of the social consequences of the massive hit on the economy cause by widespread lockdowns.
Bottom line, travel will most likely resume as before. We're already seeing the beginning of that in Europe. If restrictions remain my guess is that they will be for environmental reasons (but perhaps implemented using Covid-19 as a pretext).