Global tourism could face loses of $2 trillion in 2021: UNWTO

NEW DELHI: According to a latest estimate by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO), the tourism sector will bear a loss of $2 trillion in 2021, making the sector’s recovery ‘fragile’ and ‘slow’. The estimates were released by the UNWTO on Monday, November 29, and revealed that the same amount was lost in the tourism sector’s revenue in 2020, making it the sector worst hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The uneven distribution of vaccine coverage globally and new travel restrictions imposed by various countries over the discovery of new variants of the virus will prompt reduction in the demand for travel. The emergence of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 has prompted dozens of countries to impose bans on international travel, which have been supplemented with lockdowns in a few regions too.

The data released by the UNWTO also states that the rate of arrivals of international travelers will remain 70-75% lower than 2019 levels in 2021, same as was the case on 2020. Despite the fact that the period between July-September this year witnessed a 58% increase in tourist arrivals as compared to the same period last year, it was still 64% lower as compared to the same period in 2019.

Zurab Pololikashvili, Secretary General, UNWTO, said that although the results of the third quarter of 2021 are encouraging, arrivals are still 76% lower than pre-pandemic levels. Moreover, results across different regions of the world are different.

In regions like Southern and Mediterranean Europe, the Caribbean, North and Central America, arrivals rose above 2020 levels in the first nine months of 2021. In the case of the Asia and Pacific region, however, the rate of tourist arrivals was down by 95% when compared with 2019 levels, as many destinations remained closed to non-essential travel.