Let’s take a break and relax this (brief) summer, and whatever happens in the autumn, happens. What needs be will be, we just need to see a bit of sea.

Voja Zanetic

In the wasteland of our digital existence we come across the following astute leftist thought: yearly vacations and tourism are primarily sly capitalist inventions.

This senile author was explained the idea in the following way: once, or if one is lucky a couple of times a year, the working class lives the life of the bourgeoisie – others prepare their food and drink, make their beds, and clean their rooms. The level of ‘bourgeois’-ness is measured by the amount of money spent on ‘stars’ indicating levels of service, or the exoticness of their destination. You can have a nice view too, subject to additional payment. A view to the present, though; neither the future or the past are that nice to look at.

Now, Covid has seriously threatened the institution of Tourism. This happened on many levels: the working class is diminishing, and those who remain have less money to spend. Fear, the greatest enemy of leaving the house and thereby – travel, has seeped into our usually curious traveler souls and hedonistic hearts. And if fear wasn’t enough, ‘lockdowns’ tend to aid non-travel: it’s a bit difficult to get to a beach when you can’t go to your local bar.

In short, the pandemic hasn’t only attacked our healthcare system, which handles us at our worst. It attacked our tourism system, which handles us at our best.

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And tourism has to exist. We have to go somewhere, in order for everything around us not to go where it shouldn’t, as we said in the beginning. But, regardless of the possible ideological presumptions for tourism which cannot be evidenced, there are many practical, obvious consequences.

Many countries rely on tourism for a huge share of their GDP. There are many people, millions more, whose personal economies depend on what the people with suitcases bring in. Small vacations are, therefore, big business. And it could be even bigger, as the ‘new normality’ which has been offered to us over the past two years, created an inextinguishable desire for the old normal. Tourism is definitely at the top of that wish list.

The solution to this problem lies in probability. If we are vaccinated, we are a lot less likely to get (seriously) ill Somewhere Else. And if we go Somewhere with lower infection rates, it is also less likely someone will give us the virus, whatever the Somewhere variant is. If the weather is nice Somewhere, it is a lot less likely we’d transmit the virus out in the open. Aside from all of the above, Somewhere has an incredible competitive advantage:  Somewhere is not Here. And everywhere is better than Here.

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Tourism, therefore, will thrive this summer, based on the overall sentiment of temporarily forgetting everything we’ve tried to learn and understand over the past two years. ‘I-won’t-catch-it Tours’ is a great global travel agency which will take us everywhere, inspired by the idea that Hopefully Nothing Happens. And the virus couldn’t be more thrilled to hear this.

Because the virus is a mobile, global monster with numbers to its advantage: only 21% of the world population has had their first dose of the vaccine, and only 2% have actually had coronavirus. To this we can add its loving tendency to mutate, and people’s loving tendency to be free, not locked down, and not wearing a mask. Not to mention the joys of life where you spill alcohol into your stomach, rather than on your hands. Cheers!

So, this means: let’s take a break and relax this (brief) summer, and whatever happens in the autumn, happens. What needs be will be, we just need to see a bit of sea.

Safe travels to us!