Traveling Industry Won’t Recover Until A Vaccine Develops, Booking Holding CEO

CEO of Booking Holdings, Glenn Fogel said that the travel industry is going to continue bleeding until a vaccine for covid-19 is developed because that is only when the travelers around the world would feel safe.

“I think no one is going to feel comfortable, fully comfortable, traveling until they can feel that they are safe and that requires either, perhaps we’ll have a vaccine — hopefully not long from now — or an effective treatment, would
help. Until that happens, I think people are going to be concerned about travel,” said Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings

The Economies have been under a complete lockdown in the last few months but are beginning to reopen which also increased the stock levels at the Wall Street but for travel entities like websites owned by Booking, Kayak, Priceline.com, and others the recovery looks tedious as he reported there has been a massive drop in travel booking at 51% in the first quarter.

“I’m fairly confident this is not something that’s going to come back in quarters … a full recovery is going to take years,” said Fogel.

As the last resort to get travelers’ trust, hotels are promoting their hygiene and revamped cleaning methods. Airlines are also discussing removing the middle seat to enforce social distancing while traveling.

“It’s going to take time for a vaccine to be distributed to enough people to establish the immunity we need in society,” he said.
Fogel also said that currently people must be isolated and the spread must be stopped by breaking the chain of exposure.

“In terms of furloughs or layoffs, we are obviously looking at everything, and what’s the future size and shape of the company going to be, and it depends on what we think will be the rate of recovery in travel,” said Fogel.