Tourism in the age of the pandemic is about taking on the serious business of disaster preparedness, of which ground work has been done in areas such as the Federal Government’s efforts in improving the ease of doing business in Nigeria, coupled with the newer visa collection at the point of entry regime.
While the past few decades have seen humans build enduring communities across geographies – in no less our various Diasporas; across intellectual interests; and even within a virtual continuum enabled by cybernetics and disruptive technologies, yet we are now rudely confronted by the flip-side of having to find means of surviving the shared burden of infection and disease as a global community.
In the work that I do, which has now become a source of concern to many across geographies, local and international, we are experiencing one of the lowest periods ever, which a few cynics have unfortunately described as the death of tourism, as the notion of pandemic tourism appears almost as a contradiction in terms, since the human outreach quickly recoils in periods of any sort of upheaval.
Of course, epidemics and pandemics impact on tourism and its related ecosystems most severely, as the instinct for safety in humans leads to restrictions of movement that deeply whittle the businesses of airlines, hotels and restaurants, travel agents, tour operators, and other tourism stakeholders. As diseases can now travel with ease, from the most affluent parts of the Far Eastern and Western Hemispheres to the poorest villages in Africa and Asia, with the speed of the Internet and on the back of economic routes, in a manner highlighting our interconnectedness and shared vulnerability, we need to urgently perfect; a robust system of healthcare and health management, embedded in a strong capacity for response to and containment of epidemics and pandemics.