The ‘La Palma Declaration’ is set to ease travel during & post COVID

Published on : Thursday, December 3, 2020

With the target of setting up of actions and commitments to resume international travel, the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) and the Spanish Government organized a hybrid conference. The ‘La Palma Declaration’ has been signed by all key parties as a result of the discussions.

The public and private sector leaders took part in the discussion, covering 95 countries and over 100 Travel & Tourism companies.

The Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, re-mentioned his commitment to tourism and confirmed the leadership of Spain by arranging an important conference to talk about all the main measures required to revitalize international Travel & Tourism.

The ‘La Palma Declaration’ features many key recommendations which comprise the adoption of international protocols for COVID-19 tests before the departure, and result acceptance upon arrival at destination. This testing regime has proved successful in Spain and the Canary Islands.

The health control measures like this, will bring forth shorter quarantine periods when returning to the country of origin, or eliminate quarantines completely.

Also, the ‘La Palma Declaration’ proposes to set up international agreements to execute international travel corridors to make the return easy for leisure as well as business travel between countries and cities with similar epidemiological situations.

Also, travel & tourism companies were invited to suggest additional measures to get accustomed and facilitate travels in pandemic. These options included providing flexible bookings, payment terms, or changes due to COVID-19, or providing inexpensive or higher value products to incentivize domestic and international travel.

To the new global situation, the ‘La Palma Declaration’ requests all parties to make an adjustment to their business models and work jointly to set up new products that motivate domestic and international Travel & Tourism, along with implementing better training programs and train tourism workers and SMEs, make them powerful with the digital skills needed to adapt to the “new normal”.