Reflections on the First Summer Travel Season Post-COVID Restrictions
One of the least crowded moments we experienced—regardless of the time of day—in Brussels’s Grand Place. Brussels, Belgium. August 15, 2022.
The first full-force summer travel season of the post-COVID-restrictions era just wrapped, and I have a few observations.
First, the basis: I traveled a tiny bit this summer, but mainly to places where friends and family had planned their vacations (so that I could see them). In addition, I hosted or saw a few friends and family at my home base in Lausanne. Therefore, these observations come not from my own long-distance international travel—I live in Europe, I traveled in Europe this summer, and I’ve traveled in Europe over the past two years when and where possible—but via observing other people going on international travel for the first time since the COVID pandemic hit.
Let’s just say I noticed a lot of frustration, anger, and clashes on all sides. I didn’t encounter many people having amazing travel experiences. Everyone seemed uncomfortable, unhappy, and frustrated a good portion of the time. In general, people seemed disappointed and confused.
A breakdown:
The Excitement before the Storm
We went to Rome and to Paris in May, just ahead or at the start of the summer travel season, and people were incredibly chipper. Bubbly, even, which especially says something for people who live in highly touristed cities.
Travelers and tourists would be back this summer, they said, and they were excited to see them again after two years of a lot of quiet. This word came from people on all sides, from professionals working in completely unrelated-to-travel industries through to people working in cafes, restaurants, tourist sites, and tour guides. People were eager to have the buzz back. Smiles and casual conversations came from unexpected quarters. Everyone thought they were rested and ready.
On the other side, in talking with friends and family in the United States who planned trips to Europe or elsewhere international this summer, I could sense the pent-up pressure and demand and excitement around traveling abroad again after holding off and holding back—for the most part—for two or three years.
Game’s on.
The Storm
Intentions on all sides? Good ones.
However.
Everyone was out of practice.
Most tourist hotspots—and their hotels, cafes and restaurants, sites, guides, and local populations—had gotten out of rhythm with massive tourist influxes. Supplies, staff, capacities, and best attempts at planning all fell apart, especially as the number of tourists was higher than in pre-COVID summers due to the demand for travel.
Most tour operators and travel methods—think airlines and cruise lines, most particularly—seemed even less interested in normal in customer service, even though their unprecedented levels of disorganization and lack of preparation should have demanded bend-over-backwards apologies and accommodation. Cruise lines, anxious to have travelers back, didn’t tell people that they couldn’t have the cruise experiences they’d booked (in some cases before COVID hit) until their “guests” had arrived on site to take the cruises—and could no longer back out or get a refund. Airlines canceled flights and lost bags and confused everyone with unexplained or nonexistent requirements and regulations that they enforced or didn’t enforce at whim.
And most tourists had gotten out of practice with being tourists, especially to international destinations. After two or three years in local environments where everything is expectable, habitual, and understandable (if not even managed and controlled by them personally), they confronted cultures and languages and systems that they couldn’t immediately understand or even comprehend how to fix or to whom they could address a question or concern. The flexible thinking required and the exiting of comfort zones demanded by international travel disoriented people after two years of not needing to exercise these skills as much—and I don’t need to explain how jet lag after long-haul travel can exacerbate the frustration. I get from place to place how? I can’t understand what anyone’s saying. Why did I get that reaction from that guy?
Exacerbating Factors
Over the past several years—long before COVID—social media has made travel seem more accessible, more desirable, and easier than ever. And of the past two or three years, people have lived their international or exotic travel experiences almost exclusively via the web, television, and movies.
Though we all consciously know that reality is never like the media—even if the media comes directly from friends and family via social channels—our brains still like to fool us. What anyone experiences on an actual international travel will only pale in comparison to what people have imagined after years of scrolling through photos and videos and dreaming about traveling again. The reality, especially after so long of nothing coming between it and the dream, could only disappoint.
In addition, the post-COVID pent-up demand for travel and experiences overdelivered, by which I mean that the crush of tourists I experienced in my voyages to common tourist destinations in Europe (think Paris, Rome, and Brussels) were unlike anything I’d seen before. I had several experiences of feeling completely overwhelmed and squeezed uncomfortably by other people—and that was just in trying to walk down the street.
Add in an exceptionally hot summer—no one’s fault, yet there it was—and well, you have problems.
The Prevailing Mood
Disorientation, crowding, heat, dashed plans and expectations, and feeling overwhelmed soured the tourist mood shortly after arrival.
I’d had the good fortune to see friends and family during their visits to Europe before the COVID pandemic disrupted international travel, and I had not seen this level of sideways then. This time, not only did everyone seem more frustrated and disappointed, they also needed a lot more help with the basics of travel—stuff that they would easily have deciphered on their own if they’d had more recent travel practice. My visitors this past summer seemed much more disoriented than they had in the past—and feeling disoriented doesn’t typically make for a great travel experience.
On the other side of the table, the overwhelming number of tourists, the lack of proper planning, and angry, tired, confused, frustrated, hot, and inexperienced guests made for some ugly scenes and very unhappy service staff.
When we passed through Paris at the end of August and saw friends and family—all of whom in this group work in the travel-adjacent service industries—they shared a general feeling of exhaustion and one said very definitively that the good mood that preceded the summer travel season had completely evaporated. Everyone needed a break.
The Aftermath
Predictions, based on all this?
Hard to say.
I’d assume many people who traveled this summer went home without a strong urge for more international travel—at least in the short term. Of course, memories are short. However, I do wonder if the COVID-inspired trend to travel more regionally, to stay in comfort zones, and to stick with guided and shepherded “experiences” when traveling internationally—especially as tour operators get back in their grooves a bit more—won’t become even more the norm than before.
At least for a few years, that is. Until things normalize a little more and everyone feels more at ease easing out of their comfort zones. Little by little.
We’ll see.
Further possibility: Concerns about the environmental costs of travel seem to be rising, especially given the more evident effects of climate change and the waves of energy and water crises globally. Will environmental concerns change enough people’s inclinations to reduce tourist travel by much? Probably not, independent of a rise in the financial cost of travel. However, if the cost of travel to a person’s or family’s wallet goes up along with the concerns about the environment, long-distance and international travel may be beyond the interests and the reach of more people again, as it has been in the past. They’ll still do it, but differently and not as often.
Travel times, they are a’changin’.