Corona virus pandemic to cost the global tourism sector $2.0 trillion in lost revenue in 2021

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

The coronavirus pandemic will cost the global tourism sector $2.0 trillion in lost revenue in 2021, said the UNWTO, saying that the sector’s recovery would be “fragile” and “slow.”

The forecast from the Madrid-based UNWTO comes with Europe struggling with a surge in infections and as a new heavily mutated Covid-19 variant, known as Omicron, spreads across the globe.

International tourist arrivals this year is expected to remain 70-75 percent below the 1.5 billion arrivals recorded in 2019 before the pandemic, a similar decline as in 2020, according to the UNWTO.

The global tourism sector already lost $2.0 trillion (1.78 trillion euros) in revenue last year due to the pandemic, said the UNWTO, making it one of sectors affected harshly by the health crisis.

“Despite the recent improvements, uneven vaccination rates around the world and new Covid-19 strains” such as the Delta variant and Omicron “could impact the already slow and fragile recovery,”the UNWTO said in a statement.
“It’sa very unpredictable situation,” said the UNWTO head ZurabPololikashvili.

“It’s a historical crisis in the tourism industry but again tourism has the power to recover quite fast,”Pololikashviliadded beforethe start of the WTO’s annual general assembly in Madrid on Tuesday. “I really hope that 2022 will be much better than 2021,” he said.

Besides virus-related travel restrictions, tourism is also coping with the economic strain caused by the pandemic, the spike in oils prices and the disruption of supply chains, said the UNWTO.

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