Gloria Guevara is Fighting for Leadership in Opening Travel WTTC Style

Once a country has vaccinated a large proportion of the senior population, mortality rates will drop, consequently reducing the pressure on hospitals. But it’s very important to continue not only to vaccinate but also with the rest: wearing masks, testing, and so on… and all this will help us resume international mobility.

Right now, the question is, “How do we bring back mobility in a safe, secure, and responsible way that will allow us to restore the economy and bring back the millions of jobs that have been impacted?” So, yes, we see a light at the end of the tunnel and we believe that very shortly we will see a great deal of progress, but right now I feel like we’re still in the middle of the storm in many countries.

The WTTC leader suggests:
Governments need to do two things. One is that they should figure out how to share more. Share knowledge, share basic experiences and share data.

I understand that we didn’t have the right platforms for that before, and there was some lack of trust in some international organisations, but we need to get over that. The second thing is for them to get to the point where they understand that this is not going away. We need to coexist with this virus, and if they think we’re going to go back to 2019, that’s not the case. We need to look forward. How do we make this crisis an opportunity, and how do we resume travel mobility, bring back those jobs? In order for us to be able to do that, we need to have the right policies and the right protocols from governments. We need to have that understanding. Right now, there is still uncertainty, and part of that uncertainty has been created because of the lack of coordination.

For instance, I wish an understanding or agreement could be found where it’s clear what one needs to do to move from one country to another, because people of course don’t want to be stuck in foreign countries. We would thus like to see an agreement on collaboration between governments so that we can resume mobility in a safe manner and make it effective, to have some certainty that would allow us to resume international travel.

We are not in favor of vaccination passports, so much as “health” passes, as we believe that vaccination of everyone in the world is going to take years. However, we believe that the aggressive role out of vaccines is going to help and is part of the solution. The challenge in our mind is “How do you make the invisible visible?”

The technology, the apps, create a seamless experience. As I said, we need multiple components as part of the solution: testing, contact tracing and health apps. Then of course you have the vaccination roll-out. You need to have all these pieces to create the whole solution.

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