As travel bubbles begin, don't expect a miracle

This Sunday, the post-Covid travel era will begin at airports in Hong Kong and Singapore. Two hundred passengers, pre-screened for the virus, will board flights in each city bound for the other. Upon arrival, they'll be tested again. If they're negative, they can then roam free - without having to undergo the two-week quarantines required of other travellers. It's the world's first-known Covid travel bubble, and the devastated global tourism industry has pinned its hopes on a successful roll-out. Unfortunately, even if the experiment works, it won't herald the return of anything like the freewheeling air culture of pre-pandemic life. Instead, it will probably signal a newly expensive and rarefied era of travel - one that's very unlikely to support an industry that depends on cheap flights. It is no accident that this experiment is happening in the Asia-Pacific. For two decades, air travel has expanded more rapidly here than anywhere else. In 2010, 15.9m people visited Thailand; in 2019, 39.8m visited, more than two-thirds of them from Asia. Few of those travellers arrived in a first-class cabin. Instead, their Thai beach holidays were mostly enabled by the explosive growth of low-cost airlines. From the earliest days of the pandemic, "travel bubbles" were proposed as one solution to this devastation. But setting them up turned out to be far more difficult than expected. Story has more.<br/>