Opinion
Delays, crowds and chaos: No escape even on a getaway
Summary
- Long after ‘revenge travel’ became a cliché, travel is rebounding this year to reclaim pre-pandemic levels. This is good news for the tourism industry but maybe not for travellers.
The plane’s doors had just closed when the pilot announced that because of congestion at London’s Heathrow airport, the plane faced an hour-and-a-half delay before it could taxi to the runway. Eventually, it took off more than 30 minutes late.
When we landed at Doha airport in the middle of the night, the terminal was so jammed with people that it seemed like another planet where mysterious Martians in burgundy jackets had turned night into day. Everywhere one looked, people were running for connecting flights, with very few staff around to direct anyone. The area where flights for South Asia take off, as a witty Sri Lankan friend put it, “is a real mess."
“There are always people running to those gates. 1.45am to 2,30am at Doha downstairs is akin to an Olympics warm-up." Onward travellers to South Asia are usually directed to a bus that circles the bleak moonscape around the airport for 10 minutes before depositing passengers at the aircraft.
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Trying to get to a theatre for a matinee show a week earlier in London, I found myself queuing on Tower Bridge simply to get off it amid so many tourists that it was possible to imagine—as on Portobello Road in Notting Hill where I lived for almost a decade till 2010—that the city is occupied exclusively by a nomadic population that had parachuted in on low-cost flights.
From queues at crowded airports to long lines at popular monuments, peak travel season around the world resembles what the Booker Prize winning author Shehan Karunatilaka depicted as the beginning of afterlife, a selection process for heaven and hell: a succession of queues managed by an inept socialist bureaucracy to determine who goes where.
Long after ‘revenge travel’ became a cliché, travel is rebounding this year to reclaim pre-pandemic levels. This is good news for the labour-intensive tourism industry. International visitor travel jumped by a third in 2023, but still remained almost 15% below 2019 levels, according to the World Tourism Council. But a boom in domestic tourism and higher ticket prices and hotel tariffs saw revenues increase by 23% over 2022, which was only 4% below the 2019 level.
European cities are raising fees for local attractions in an effort to reduce the tourist inflow. In March, The Guardian reported that since the beginning of this year, “foreign visitors to Istanbul’s grand mosque Hagia Sophia, which gets about 3.5m visits a year, would have to pay €25 for the privilege.
Venice is so overrun by visitors it has introduced what amounts to an entrance fee for the entire city, ranging from €3 to €10." In Spain, cities such as Barcelona and Seville are looking at ways to control the inflow of tourists; since last year, the proof-of-funds that visitors must show has increased considerably.
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Asia’s most popular tourist destination, Thailand, is moving in the opposite direction. It is trying to reinvigorate its economy by broadening visa-free entry to 93 countries and territories, up from 57 earlier.
This liberalization took place with effect from 15 July, as the government seeks to boost annual incoming arrivals to 39 million, a level Thailand last saw in 2019, before the pandemic. In the first six months of the year, arrivals passed 17.5 million.
I would wager that in 2024, the number of travellers around the world will get close to levels seen before the pandemic, while everywhere airports and airlines have become used to managing with fewer staff. This is in effect the double whammy that is making travel less enjoyable than before.
Social media publicity, meanwhile, has led to crowded attractions being overrun with even more visitors. For those who do not have children and can avoid travel during school holidays, or empty nesters, the best option is to avoid the peak season.
Living in London as the Financial Times’ travel editor between 2003 and 2010, I never travelled during summer. When I moved to Hong Kong, I never went away during the weeklong Chinese New Year break in late January/early February because nearby destinations were swarmed.
My aversion to crowds while I am on holiday extends to my nostalgia for visiting Rajasthan’s monuments, as I did as a schoolboy decades ago, without cavalcades of tourist buses that seem like invading non-violent armies. I visited Mehrangarh in Jodhpur and the magical fort at Nagaur in summer about 10 years ago and wandered around in hallucinatory happiness, despite 45° Celsius heat.
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I was so alone on an early morning in Nagaur that when the caretaker’s wife’s shadow fell across the murals I was looking at, I jumped in fright.
The trouble with this strategy is that some attractions are date-bound and seasonal. Last Thursday, I was at Wimbledon, gasping at the Renaissance-styled artistry of Lorenzo Musetti as his guile on the tennis court helped him triumph over the much-higher ranked Taylor Fritz.
Most of us, including Queen Camilla a few rows away, didn’t leave our seats for three hours. When the sun is out in summer, Wimbledon (and much of England) seems like a real garden of Eden. It is a fundamental rule of travel that its many pleasures mean delayed flights and chaotic airports are quickly forgotten.
