Destinations known | Flying was the worst – will travel in a post-pandemic world be any different?

For many of us, flying has been a necessary evil without which we wouldn’t have been able to reach our holiday destination or business convention. But in the alternate reality that is 2020, interminable queues for check-in and security, unfriendly immigration officers and the tedium of taxiing to take off have acquired a rose-tinted appeal.

At least, that’s what the bosses at Taiwan’s Songshan Airport hope.

In northern Taipei – no visit to nearby Yuanshan Park would be complete without cowering as aircraft descend on their approach to Songshan – the airport is the prize in a competition offering 90 people the opportunity to “go abroad at Songshan”, or, to put it more prosaically, to tour the facility and simulate setting off on a distant sojourn without actually going anywhere.

According to CNN Travel, the lucky winners will “relive the experience of going through immigration, boarding a plane and then disembarking and returning home”. It might be a novel use of an idle airport, and a chance to promote the renovated departures hall, but excuse us if we’re not first in line at the check-in counter at least two hours before the scheduled “take off”.

More than any other industry, tourism has been upended by the coronavirus pandemic and its related restrictions on movement, causing companies and individuals alike to reassess their need – and their desire – to travel. The reasons for reflection are varied, but whether inspired by economic or environmental concerns, or anxieties about catching and spreading Covid-19, the outcome is likely to be the same – all signs point to a world that journeys a little less but a little further than before, at least in the early days of the new normal.