The Thoughtful Travel Podcast

I don’t think we’re at the post-pandemic stage yet, but we definitely seem to be at the stage where people are travelling a lot more - even the Australian border is open now, and Western Australia’s will be soon too. So it seems like an appropriate time to revisit the great hopes of 2020 - when we all said that after the pandemic we’ll be much more thoughtful travellers, basically. In this episode, I talk about some academic research and a prediction of the different ways people will approach travel after the pandemic - they’ve based it on ‘terror management theory’ which is intriguing in itself. After discussion both the short and long term predictions of how people may change their thoughts about travel, I dig into the anecdotal evidence I’ve been able to collect in recent weeks. Basically, I think there is good news and bad news. And I really hope the good news wins out in the end! Links: “Proximal and distal post-COVID travel behavior’ in the Annals of Tourism Research, Volume 88, by L Miao, J Im, X Fu