Life after Covid – and we can't wait to do the same things

 How’s re-entry going, in your work and life? I spoke to a young woman in the beauty  business at the weekend. She was off work for five months, due to Covid, and the other five people who share her house (!) all worked in hospitality (!!) and somehow survived Ireland’s stringent lockdown. That’s all but a memory now, unless your business was ruined by it, which I fervently hope is not the case. Travel is becoming a reality again. It seems half of Ireland has flown to Portugal in the past few weeks, and I hear of people planning to revive their Christmas shopping jaunt to New York (why? All that way for stuff that is either wildly expensive or junk.) Australia announced that its borders are reopening, so all the Aussies stuck in other parts of the world for the past 18 months can finally go home, and those trapped in the homeland can get back to their actual places of residence.

Being something of an Eeyore, I’d expected that air fares would be astronomical once flying and flitting resumed. So I’m delighted to report that the return fare London-Melbourne-London with Qantas is A$1800 (about €1128), not a lot different from the pre-pandemic price. As I live in Dublin it might be tricker to get such a good fare – Etihad, which flies down under via Abu Dhabi, is quoting return fares around €6,500 at the moment. When I drilled into this, using skyscanner.ie, there are other return fares for around €1,650 – but the travel times on these varied from 59 to 45 hours! Plenty of connections and waiting, and remember you have to wear a mask the whole way. In Before Times the unmasked journey had slimmed down to 24 hours or less.

So up comes the clash, the acid test, whatever portentous cliché you choose: we’re all very woke about the climate crisis, so will we return to our jet-setting carbon-munching ways now that lockdown restrictions are melting like the Arctic glaciers? I’ve written before about the effect of the pandemic on business travel. It would be surprising if that ever reached early 21st century levels again. But pleasure travel is another thing. People are booking just because they can, relying heavily on their vaccinated status. (Let’s not think about those reports of doubly vaccinated people ending up in hospital with Covid all the same)  And an analysis of searches by tourists on Google Maps in the past 12 months revealed that the usual suspects – the Eiffel Tower, the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona, and the Louvre in Paris – were still top of the tree.

 

Plus ça change?

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pity the pizza guy who is knocked off his bike and beaten

  Dublin’s north inner city is not a place you want to be assigned if you are a Deliveroo driver. These (mostly) young men of non-Irish backgrounds are finding it’s a war zone, where they are likely to be attacked, robbed, assaulted as they try, of all innocuous things, to deliver some noodles or a pizza.   The problem has been festering for some time, and appeared on the national news again this weekend. The chief elements are boredom and racism. Youths with nothing to do,  suffering from a large dose of Covid lockdown frustration, appear to have found the cyclists with the grey and green Deliveroo boxes on their backs a tempting target. Rocks are thrown, knives are drawn, money taken.    And now the Deliveroo victims, it seems, are fighting back. Simmering anger was stoked to a dreadful degree by the death of Brazilian man Thiago Cortes in August 2020. Although Cortes was killed by a joyriding car driven by teenagers, the suspicion that he was targeted as...
Read more

Guys, this orange creature is not thinking about you, but about securing a Trump dynasty

  I t’s this: how can a vast modern country choose for its leader a person who has no interest in their well-being and history, but only in his own power and cementing that for his family?   And the answer I give is – well, the people in that country cannot know what is going on. They can’t follow the news, or understand what their leader has done to the reputation of their nation. They must have low moral standards, because surely a person who announces without any compunction that unless they win, it must have been fraud is …. Rodrigo Duterte? The guy in Belarus? Vladimir Putin?   People might wonder why I care so much, but I’m not alone. Setting aside the millions of Americans (Joe is going to win the popular vote again) who are horrified by Trump, all over the world the disgust at his behaviour is widespread. And he is the leader of the United States, if not any more the City on the Hill, still a template, an example, a glorious place of achievement, variety and its o...
Read more

Yes, Minister, less is more

  Today, some pungent   advice to the Irish Health Minister   from a well-known communications expert: halve your media appearances.   A nation chuckled – the politician in question is in a first-time ministry, obviously keen as mustard to make his mark, but during the Covid nightmare has made some increasingly bizarre interventions, including last week’s when he suggested that the tortured vaccine rollout in Ireland be turned on its head by prioritizing the 30s age group. This reversed the previous wisdom that older age cohorts should get the vaccines first. Ah dear. The minister was “spoken to” by the Taoiseach, our prime minister. “Ah, Stephen, could I see you in my office for a few minutes?”    Setting aside the political embarrassment, the advice to be less visible brought up one of the conundrums of the online-all-the-time era: when do people get sick of you? Kim Kardashian’s legions of fans seem to want her all the time. I learnt yesterday that even ...
Read more