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Skift Take
These are strangely precarious and hopeful times. As the top global executives in travel gather this week at Skift Global Forum, these are the big questions they are grappling with — and our editors will push them on, on stage — even as some answers have emerged in the last year.
In a few months, we will be two years into this coronavirus pandemic, two years through the toughest times the travel industry has ever faced in modern history.
In the naive and chaotic early days of the pandemic last year, we had so many questions about what shape the coming future of travel would take, so much so that I and the rest of the Skift editorial and research team banged out 114 questions on it, a lengthy list that we posted on Apr 27.
And as I wrote it then, “These are the questions whose answers one way or the other will define how travel moves on from here and what the coming future would look like. These broad lines of enquiry will define our coverage of the global travel recovery in coming months and years.”
Now, 18 months later, so many of these questions have indeed defined thousands of stories, dozens of research reports and tons of work on behalf of our industry partners that our various teams have worked on since then. Many of these 114 questions have been answered in definitive ways, some we are just beginning to see the contours of answers emerge, some of the questions seem silly in hindsights, and many we have no sense of the answers so far.
This week is the week of Skift Global Forum 2021 for us, where a glittering array of CEOs and top executives of global travel companies are gathering, most of them in person at the iconic TWA Hotel in New York City, and some of them coming in virtually, as this age now makes it so seamlessly possible.
One of the clearest answers to have emerged during this phase is that travel is NOT a human right, as the industry leaders had been saying for the decade of hyper growth, and if it was, clearly is the first one to go away. Every calamity, every conflict, every geopolitical issue impinges its own rules and travel, the free movement of humans, is one of the first to be sacrificed. The hubris is gone, and what has emerged instead is travel is indeed a privilege we have to balance with the complex, intertwined lived realties of the planet.
What has also emerged in the rebound of travel in sporadic spurts in the last year — mostly domestic travel — is that travel is indeed a human need, that connection that is fostered through traveling and meeting people is indeed the default human condition. The desperation to travel speaks to the desperation of connection.
So now the big question the industry and indeed the world of travelers have to answer: how do we weave these dichotomous threads of travel as a human need and yet a privilege that we have to take seriously? From this umbrella question emerges a lot of other questions and themes that will come up at our global forum this week, many of which I will talk about in my opening presentation on Sept. 22 morning at the start of the main day of the conference.
If this piques your curiosity, tune in online, or if you so fancy, go on, buy a ticket last minute and join us in person, come experience the best editorial conference in all of global travel.
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