This crisis could be a chance to revolutionise air travel, to make it better, less stressful, less annoying, less toxic. Other industries are quickly realising that they need to up their game to survive. So far, airlines have done little more than moan and ask for government handouts. In my world, they’d be at the very end of the queue for state money, just behind real estate agencies.
The best we can hope for is that Covid-19 will make us look at the question of whether we actually need to travel for business at all. Often, we don’t. Meeting people face-to-face is sometimes unavoidable, and worthwhile. But we can fly smarter: we can limit the number of trips we take and use our time on those trips better. One trip to meet 20 people, as opposed to 20 trips to meet one at a time.
As recently as March it was perfectly normal to fly from, say, London to Frankfurt and back in the same day. In the new normal, that will not be desirable, nor even possible. If a three-hour journey suddenly becomes four as a result of longer queues caused by social distancing, then lots of business travelers are going to think twice about whether or not they really need to take that trip.
Then there’s leisure travel. The cost of flying will go up. This may be no bad thing: it needs to, although the cost of rail travel needs to come down to compensate. But the days of return tickets from London to Rome for 4.99 euros, or even less, must come to an end. Indeed, now would be the perfect time to introduce minimum pricing: perhaps 50 euros for a one-way flight, 75 euros for a return. The market may bring this about anyway. It’s not too expensive for anyone who really wants to travel, but it’s enough to make people think twice before jumping on a plane to Amsterdam simply for something to do at the weekend. Amsterdammers – who have seen their city returned to them in the past two months – would appear to agree.
Back in March the Political Ecology Network argued that “even if the Covid-19 crisis ends relatively soon, we cannot afford to return to levels of travel experienced previously, particularly by the wealthiest segment of the world’s population. This is not only because of the social unrest overtourism has provoked, but also because of the industry’s environmental damage (including climate change as well as pollution and resource depletion) which were already beyond unsustainable.”
It is easy to forget that it was only 15 years ago that the amount of flying we now accept as perfectly normal started to become so. A reset is well overdue.
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Source link : https://emerging-europe.com/from-the-editor/i-miss-travelling-but-i-dont-miss-flying/
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Publish date : 2020-05-13 07:00:00
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