Imagine you are a Japanese organiser of the Olympics, or of the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens, or of the Hong Kong Trade Development Council’s Fashion Week. You are making optimistic noises about plans for the event later this year or at some point in 2021. But what steps have been taken to enable the travel that will make the events possible?
The ground rules do not yet exist to make any such events feasible, and there have been very few conversations on the practical steps needed to make them happen. In defence of this delay, officials would probably argue that the current priority is to bring the Covid-19 pandemic under control. But as they arm-wrestle over when and how our economies can be reopened, and travel and tourism resumed, some practical and globally agreed ground rules are urgently overdue.
Hong Kong’s Fashion Week, which is planned for in July, attracted over 10,000 participants last year. The Rugby Sevens, which have been postponed to October, attracted 40,000 spectators a day. With almost all airlines grounded worldwide at present and no plans for a return to the skies, with a global patchwork of lockdown rules which would impose at least two weeks of quarantine on any traveller, and with no agreed rules for deciding whether travellers from particular countries can be regarded as “safe”, these events stand no chance of going ahead. Even Japan’s postponed Olympics, now planned for July 2021, may be a stretch.
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It was during a recent discussion among Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum’s Business Advisory Council members, mainly focused on recommendations to regional business leaders on how to respond to, and encourage recovery from, the pandemic lockdown, that it dawned on me that there is an urgent need to begin laying the ground rules on resumption of travel, and that this process will be contentious and time-consuming.
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Tracking the massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world’s airline industry in early 2020
Tracking the massive impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the world’s airline industry in early 2020
The first step is likely to be the creation of “safe travel bubbles”. The Australia-New Zealand bubble is the most advanced of these, and thus is likely to be looked to as a template for other similar bubbles. Hong Kong is in the process of agreeing on one with Macau and Guangdong province in the mainland, and there will be pressure for Taiwan to join, given that the Hong Kong-Taipei air route has for many years been the world’s busiest.
