Destinations known | With all this talk of ‘travel bubbles’, where – and when – can Hongkongers go on holiday?

In 2017, online travel platform Kayak.com declared that Hong Kong was “a nation of travel addicts”, a conclusion reached after surveying citizens’ travel planning habits. While perhaps not the most empirical of analyses, there is something to the judgment. In 2019, Hong Kong International Airport recorded almost 95 million resident departures, according to online statistics portal Statista, which equates to an average of 12.8 trips per person.

In January – during those halcyon days before the pandemic hijacked 2020 – TKS Exhibition Services, which organises Hong Kong’s International Travel Expo, asked Hongkongers about their overseas adventures, past and planned. It found that just 3 per cent of respondents had not journeyed abroad in 2019 while 46 per cent had taken three to five international jaunts and 17 per cent had enjoyed six or more trips overseas. More than 60 per cent were hoping to get away for the Easter break, in April, a proportion that seems hopelessly optimistic with the wisdom of hindsight.

Of course, that was then. But, anecdotally at least, Hongkongers’ appetite for international excursions has not diminished, it’s just a question of where – and when – we can go, ideally without having to self-isolate for 14 days upon our return.

On May 15, Thailand removed mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and South Korea from its list of “disease infected zones”. However, any hopes that the Land of Smiles (behind face masks) would become imminently accessible were dashed the following day, when the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand announced that it would be extending its ban on inbound international passenger flights until the end of June. Still, as the number of new infections in Thailand continues to drop, there is every possibility that a quarantine-free corridor could be established just in time for the rainy season.