“My stage is going to be absolutely inextricable,” he says. “We have nothing to live on.”
For a growing number of companies and Americans with the global tourism industry, the question is not so much when the coronavirus pandemic will end, but how and whether they will do so until business resumes. By seeking to repel the virus, countries that have erected barriers to tourist access have done so to expand the burden for themselves and others.
“Now it’s the survival of the fittest,” said Johann Krige, executive director of kanonkop vineyard in South Africa, where the exhaustion of tourists tasting wine threatens dozens of wine farms around the historic town of Stellenbosch, near Cape Town.
“A lot of them are going bankrupt because they just don’t have enough cash,” Krige said.
Around the world, traveling in the middle of the pandemic fits a history of transitive steps ahead in some places, but a step backwards elsewhere, from “yes” to allow visitors to retreat from places they are doing a little more against COVID-19 and others where epidemics occur. Resplendent.
The result is an ever-changing global mix of restrictions and quarantines, which do not provide long-term visibility for corporations looking to make payroll and for everyone in the industry, from trinket merchants to luxury hotels.
In Australia, the Queensland government, home to the Great Barrier Reef, has banned visitors to Sydney since Saturday due to a developing outbreak in the country’s largest city. Queensland tourism leader Brett Kapernick predicted it could charge some companies a 40% drop in revenue.
“With this pandemic, the stage becomes fluid and evolves every week,” Kapernick said. “A week ago, we didn’t think we were facing a closed border in Sydney.”
While the coastal island of Bali in Indonesia was temporarily opened to domestic visitors on Friday, Da Nang beaches in Vietnam were deserted. The city closed its doors on Tuesday to involve an organization of nearly a hundred cases.
Without any important details of tourism, some corporations already seem doomed to failure. Most luxury hotels in the historic centre of Rome did not reopen last spring, when Italy began allowing arrivals from other countries of the European Union and other countries. At the beginning of the pandemic, Italians who painted for years as dining staff, chefs or maids in hotels looked for paintings on the estate, collecting completion and vegetables.
On the Portuguese Algarve coast, individual mistakes are also looming in empty hotels, bars and restaurants that are wasting the hope that tourists will return temporarily enough to stay afloat. In a region that is almost entirely dependent on tourism, the unemployment rate has already risen by 230%.
And in Oxford, England, tour operator Frederick Laurie clings to British “cationics” and describes them as “green shoots” in a bleak year in a different way. He admits that his number will never compensate for the ruinous fall of foreign visitors who once invaded the city’s university before the coronavirus drove them away.
“This is an incredibly complicated time for us,” he says. His 10-year-old company, Footprints Tours, saw his revenue drop by 70%.
The world’s losses amount to billions. The percentage drop in the number of visitors is double digits. Tourism revenues in South Africa fell 98% in May compared to the same month last year, according to the Tourism Business Council, and more than one million jobs in its sector are at risk.
Governments in countries that rely heavily on tourism are seeking to use bailouts to keep businesses afloat. The Thai wardrobe approved this week projects worth more than $700 million for the tourism industry. Bulgaria is providing tax exemptions and employment subsidies to its tourism sector and is preparing for massive discounts on its workforce of 290,000 people. Hotel owners complain that they have more workers than consumers at Bulgaria’s largest beach resort, Sunny Beach.
Dozens of Caribbean islands have tourism between 20% and 80% of their GDP, however, the hotel occupancy rate in the region is now less than 10%, according to officials. To compensate for lost tourism, Barbados grants a one-year visa to others wishing to temporarily move to the island and paintings of a house near the beach.
The positive facets of the global pandemic are rare. Among them: locals who cannot or hesitate to rediscover attractions where foreign tourists rushed to grab their elbows.
Only animals have world-class animal parks in South Africa due to closure regulations prohibiting foreign tourists and making it illegal for South Africans to travel between holiday provinces. In Kruger National Park, lions sleep quietly on the roads and roam empty pavilions, while elephants roam as they please.
At the Louvre Museum in Paris, it is now imaginable to contemplate the works with serenity. It’s a rare gift for Parisians, but a nightmare for tour guides, who piled up this week to protest, dressed in black and masks, to ask for more monetary help. Among them, Janice Baneux, decidedly pessimistic about her future.
“Some other people have had to sell their homes, return to their parents and wait until next year, when tourism will return,” he said. “But this year, there is no hope.”
(AP)