Aviācija un izdzīvošana pasaulē: ilgtspējīga līdzsvara atrašana

Again, that sort of bubble does leave the uncertainty of what I call third party mingling, that is if you’ve got bilateral parties in a bubble, each of them needs to accept any added third country origin travelers who are mingling with them until you’ve got total vaccination you can be certain that there’s going to be no carriage of the COVID-19 back when they return. So, in this context passports are becoming a key tool, I’ll talk about it in a moment, but they are just tools. The vital precondition is multilateral government, health authority, consensus, and a commonality of approach. And that’s a long way off it seems to me.

So passing through this traveled past profusion we’ve got, understandably a lot of organizations are anxious to establish a general platform and individual companies are actually looking to achieve market advance by adopting some form of recognizable evidence that a passenger has been vaccinated. And I’ve listed here, I’m not going to go through them, listed a number. Obviously the amount of travel paths is attempting to be the core, but in reality it seems to be vital that that travel path will also be able to embrace a whole host of others, whether it be airlines or whether it be companies who are establishing some form of path, digital, or otherwise. There needs to be cohesion there, there needs to be coherence. I don’t think we’re going to see one individual breakout like a VHS back in the old days, it’s going have to be some sort of compendium of different systems.

So, when we talk about bubbles, they do sound fun, but we’ve seen very much in Australia and New Zealand it’s not easy. And I think it’s a really good case because both countries have adopted a very similar suppression strategy. We have almost no cases at all. New Zealand just had three or four and had to shut down Auckland, pretty much. In Australia, we’ve had no cases for weeks now. So, life is pretty much back to normal but opening up that bubble with New Zealand, which should be the easiest thing possible, we’re near neighbors, we have a lot of social and commercial commonality, enormous VFR market. They should be ideal for a bilateral bubble, and it was expected to operate several months ago.

But even with a modicum of government coordination, just between two governments who speak the same language, we play a lot of games with each other, it’s been extremely difficult to get something which is acceptable to both sides, particularly given Australia as a number of states, which each has their own head in this argument as it were. So, we’ve seen that this mix of politics and national self-interest make stable, reopening, highly complex. And I think it’s important to look at that case study and just see how things can work in future.

Importantly, and I said this again last month, the vaccine is not a silver bullet and it can’t be. We’re going to continue to have this hiccup effect where uncertainty about variants and mutations, opening up, closing down again if things start to look bad and that’s going to be done on a national basis, I think we’ve realized that that’s an inevitable outcome of this horrible disease. And as I mentioned before most of the world won’t be vaccinated this year or even next year.

So, the real focus needs to be on to get travel going in a predictable way. The real focus needs to be on improving procedures for testing pre and post flight, the tracing context when cases occur and of course for coordinating national standards and policies. That’s really where the silver bullet’s going to have to be.

So, in conclusion, the bottom line, when existential threat meets existence threat what is needed is lots of government and industry coordination because each of those is vital to our near and long-term future. And we’re going to have to juggle them and live with them for many years to come. Thank you.

#rebuildtravel