In lieu of China initiating steps to create a vaccine passport while the rest of the world continues vaccinating, the rollout of the vaccine passport will have a tremendous impact on international travel resuming to some level of normalcy, because of this outbound Chinese travel and global travel will look much different in the latter half of 2021. Destination marketing organizations (DMOs) and National Tourism Organizations (NTOs) serving as a gateway to destinations will look different as well, as both tourism and travel brands having to adjust to the new ecosystem of a partially vaccinated world.
As someone who works within the travel and tourism industry, a few things will become apparent as the rest of the year plays out. A vaccine passport given in countries is called an international travel health certificate. Nations who are going to start issuing international travel health certificates or vaccine passports of any kind are confident that they can reciprocate travellers to China as well.
In doing so that helps in opening bilateral travel or opening for unrestricted. The current travel restrictions are basically a bilateral right, so you have a country that does not restrict or restricts the citizens of one country from travelling. If both sides have an international travel health certificate or a vaccine passport of any kind, and they both recognize it, that will open the discussion and dialogue for countries to have a path to reopening beyond that of a foreign affair or beyond that of a political discussion, one that is centred around healthy citizens ready to travel again.
The most important thing for DMO clients to understand is that in the United States, whether a vaccine passport or program is a national one or a regional one, it is important for DMOs and NTOs to understand all over the world which travel health certificate is accepted at the immigration and at the national level.
Given that every country is rolling out their own vaccine passport or travel health certificates, it means that a receiving DMO of inbound tourists needs to be very clear as to which passports they're allowed to receive in and process and typically that's left to the national level, to figure out, in terms of regional or state or city level DMOs.
Read original article
