Much of the analysis surrounding the coronavirus outbreak and its impact on travel, tourism and hospitality has focused on two core areas: operational and recovery.
The fairly rapid (it wasn't as swift as a natural disaster) onset of the virus, for example, saw airlines wind down activity to either nothing or a mere fraction of the normal number of routes that they fly.
Elsewhere, hotels have mothballed properties or given over their rooms to assist with the accommodation of healthcare or key workers.
And destinations have shut the tours, activities and attractions that give hundreds of millions of tourists that travel the world each year something to do in their destination.
There will no doubt be academic thesis and business reviews written in the years to come about how efficiently and fairly the industry went into its own, corporate form of isolation (business travel, in particular, has been praised for its response to the crisis).
Since then, attention has inevitably (and rightly) turned to what happens next for the industry - a question that is both incredibly difficult to answer and often gives the curious reader a dozen different responses.
What is less discussed is how the nature of the lockdown period on society is going to impact the industry.
Comfort vs. necessity
Mary Meeker's annual bellwether Internet Trends Report (here is last year's) on the state of the tech and e-commerce worlds will clearly be an unusual version this year.
An initial draft of thoughts from the former-bank analyst and her Bond Capital comrades (covering "Our New World") has found its way to a number of sites this week, including Axios.
One important element of the report is how the gradual digital transformation of society has found itself accelerating rapidly in the space of just a few months.
For example, restaurants have shifted from seated dining to web-booked curbside takeaways and the volume of online grocery deliveries have sky-rocketed everywhere.
Many businesses have concentrated their IT spending to cloud-based services and product, plus traditional retail stores have adapted to selling online for the first time, either through marketplaces (Amazon) or auction sites (eBay).
These elements have all come to the fore exclusively due to citizens being forced to stay in their homes.
This lockdown of people has also coincided with the work environments of millions of people being revolutionized overnight.
The effects of the new "work from home" culture are already being felt in businesses across the world, according to Meeker's note.
Companies are acknowledging that productivity is the same or higher, video calls and messaging services are efficient and inclusive, management bottlenecks are easing and flexible working is evolving naturally and without huge issues.
Finally, consider how people themselves are behaving in a lockdown (beyond the huge number of funny memes) and how that has evolved so quickly.
Virtual meet-ups, mass streaming of media, tech-led creativity and online tuition (fitness, activities and education, for example) have become normal things that people do, because they have to in the absence of normality.
These sudden but now increasingly natural ways of moving through daily life will have a long-lasting impact on human behavior, even when society, business, pastimes and - yes - travel returns to some state of what it used to be.
Consider this...
It does not take a huge leap of the imagination to question if the processes that people have become used to when working from home will have an impact on how they evaluate a business trip, especially in the financially prudent times that await all forms of industry in the months and years ahead.
Corporate travel will not go away at scale but it may become a lot more efficient, for example, with perhaps fewer employees traveling to sign a deal when technology and virtual meetups can underpin the less productive elements of a trip.
In both the leisure and business travel worlds, customers may perhaps come to expect a personal, video-led service from the comfort of their own homes (hooray, especially, for leisure travel advisors!).
The fairly polarizing impact of virtual tours until now could actually become a thing of the past entirely, with consumers demanding that they see their accommodation or tour before they book, not least with concerns about social distancing and cleanliness inevitably becoming part of the travel ecosystem.
At the center of any such changes to travel will be the comfort that people have gained (remember, because they've been forced to) with new ways of communicating, receiving information and living during lockdown.
Travel, tourism and hospitality will return in some form, but how people interact with it will undoubtedly be shaped by their experiences of being stuck in their homes for months.
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April 24, 2020 at 07:45PM
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Lasting effects of tech-led coronavirus lockdowns on travel and tourism - PhocusWire
"lasting" - Google News
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