Just like everyone else during this neverending pandemic, my travel-deprived brain often wanders off to faraway places. Sometimes, I think about sipping a chilled watermelon daiquiri on a warm, white-sand beach somewhere in the Philippines. Other times, I think about all the delicious, cheap street food I could be having in some crowded hawker center in Singapore.
While international travel does seem far off into the future, there’s plenty of time to speculate about what it will look like in a post-pandemic world.
In my mind, travel will look very different for one simple reason:
Travel will become a hybrid activity of both vacationing and working remotely.1
Because of the high cost of plane tickets, many will find it more worthwhile to stay at a given destination for a longer period of time. And thanks to remote work, they’ll be able to do just that without using up all their vacation days.
According to Zenefits, the average American private sector worker has 10 days of PTO. Let’s assume that all of that PTO is spent on traveling, which would mean that Americans spend 10 days traveling each year.
In a post-Covid world, I wouldn’t be surprised if that number tripled for office workers. Rather than spending 10 days traveling each year, American office workers may be spending 30 days each year traveling, where 20 of those days are spent working remotely.
This is a MASSIVE paradigm shift and will drastically increase the market size of the tourism industry. Here are my predictions for how the tourism industry will have to respond to this massive shift in consumer behavior:
The return of WeWork: Yup, I said it. I’m bullish on WeWork. With the increase in the number of people who work while traveling, I think we’ll see a big increase in demand for co-working spaces. Sure, nice Airbnbs may work too, but people will naturally gravitate towards spaces with good coffee and guaranteed strong wifi.
Hotel rooms aren’t going to cut it. Hotel rooms are not at all optimized for remote work. For one, there’s not enough desk space for two people in a standard hotel room. In addition, hotel rooms aren’t going to work when both you and your partner have a meeting at the same time. So, what will fill the gap? Perhaps, Airbnb hosts and hotels will adjust the layouts of their rooms. Or, maybe another startup will rise up to fill the void.
Latitude will matter more than ever: The hybrid travel model only works if the timezones are aligned. As much as I love Singapore, I’m not going to work remotely there since I would have to work from 1:30am to 9:30am. For Americans, expect a larger share of travel destinations to be in the Americas.
A rise in timezone politics: Be on the lookout for shifting timezone boundaries as local governments alter their timezones to make themselves more appealing to remote workers.
Assorted Links
Martin Luther referred to the Epistle of James, a book in the New Testament, as an “epistle of straw.”
When the Russians had the Germans surrounded in the Battle for Stalingrad, the Russians played tango music on loudspeakers in order to intimidate the Germans, as Russians believed tango music had an eerie quality to it. You can listen to the specific tango songs that the Russians played here.
English is currently one of the few Indo-European languages without gendered nouns (e.g. el or la in Spanish), but Old English used to have gendered nouns.
This mainly just applies to people who are able to work remotely.