A survey this year by top UK tour operator Original Travel found 67 per cent of those polled planned to travel "better" post-pandemic. Meaning fewer "throwaway trips" in favour of well-planned (49 per cent) and more sustainable (32 per cent) escapes.
We'll all need to be more mindful about where we go, and how we get there. We'll still travel, obviously – it's in our DNA. But we'll do it differently. More consciously.
What does this look like in practical terms? Here's one good example: remember that monster cruise ship (MSC Opera) that crashed into a wharf and the cruiser River Countess in Venice in 2019? Turns out that was a wake-up call for Venice to finally rein in over-tourism, something we'll see happen more and more globally.
Since October, mega-ships like MSC Opera have been banned from the Venetian Lagoon. In their place, smaller vessels like the 126-passenger SS La Venezia – actually the renovated and renamed River Countess – will take travellers on far more intimate itineraries, exploring overlooked islands and forgotten corners in luxury and offering exclusive experiences such as private, after-hours tours of St Mark's Basilica.
Travellers will value sustainability more than ever.
Sustainability, the eco-footprint we leave behind, will increasingly inform travel choices. Fortunately, the industry's way ahead of us and there are already some formidable options for doing more good than harm on holiday.
African safaris are leading the world in responsible adventure tourism, with outfits like Great Plains Conservation offering walking safaris through Zimbabwe's Sapi Reserve and the World-Heritage Mana Pools National Park, home to more than 10,000 elephants. Guests sleep in solar-powered tents with a clear conscience knowing Great Plains has been a driving force in big-game conservation – preserving more than a million acres for wildlife, relocating rhinos to safe havens in Botswana, combating poaching and supporting communities in tangible ways. You can even carbon offset your entire trip.
Elsewhere on the continent, Marataba Conservation Camps in South Africa offers "a high-value guest-participation tourism model with low-impact on the environment". Translated, this means guests actively participate in conservation programmes, from tracking and monitoring species to setting camera traps and tree planting (classic-portfolio.com). At Zambia's off-grid Ila Safari Lodge, safari vehicles and boats are solar-powered for silent stalking of big game and bird life in the country's largest national park (greensafaris.com).
Even in highly developed nations, it's possible to travel more viably. The flygskam (flight shame) movement in Europe – which saw the French Parliament ban short-haul domestic flights earlier this year – has sparked a resurgence in continental train journeys.
New sleeper services have launched everywhere from Scotland, where the Caledonian Sleeper runs daily services between Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and London, and France where start-up Midnight Trains (midnight-trains.com) plans to offer swank sleeper services – "a hotel on rails" – on routes between Paris and a dozen European capitals. The Austrian Railways-led consortium Nightjet is set to launch a thrice-weekly sleeper between Vienna and Paris this month, complete with free PCR tests (nightjet.com).
After many months of confinement, we'll avoid crowded hot spots for remote, peaceful destinations.
In fact, tourism operators seem to be banking on that outcome with tour specialists like &Beyond and villa companies such as The Thinking Traveller (thethinkingtraveller.com) offering exclusive-use packages that take strangers out of the equation. Luxury Lodges of New Zealand has launched a spin-off villa collection to cater to the expected demand from families and friends keen to cocoon together in decadent surroundings.
Environments offering fresh air and vast horizons are very much in demand now. Visitor numbers to national parks are booming, here and abroad, and operators have been preparing for the surge. In the austral wilderness of Patagonia, high-end hotelier Explora has just launched two low-impact lodges – the 10-room Valle Chacabuco Lodge in Chile and the 20-room El Chalten ecolodge in Argentina. As Explora chief executive Gonzalo Undurraga says, "The pandemic has…increased the value of being in close contact with nature and of walking freely across places that are still untouched."
Simply make a plan to feel better.
Even if you don't end up going anywhere in the short term, researchers have found that simply thinking about a holiday can boost our mental well-being. A Cornell University study co-authored by Matthew Killingsworth discovered planning and booking a getaway makes us immediately happier, regardless of how far off the trip is.
"In a sense, we start to 'consume' a trip as soon as we start thinking about it," Killingsworth explains. "Our future-mindedness can be a source of joy if we know good things are coming, and travel is an especially good thing to have to look forward to."
