THE ongoing pandemic has brought the tourism industry to its knees, with multiple countries imposing travel restrictions, halting flights, and closing accommodations to stem the tide of COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) infections. But online booking platform Agoda is hopeful, banking on domestic tourism to pick up and recover long before international travel does.

“While we cannot say when the industry will fully recover, we anticipate it will be years and not months before things get back to the level they were in 2019, but we are seeing some encouraging signs of recovery in domestic travel bookings,” Agoda said in an e-mail to BusinessWorld.

In its latest earnings report, Booking Holdings, Inc. — of which Agoda is a subsidiary along with other booking platforms such as Booking.com, priceline.com, agoda.com, Kayak, Rentalcars.com, and OpenTable — announced “bookings for new room nights were down by 85% year on year in April.”

Things are not looking up worldwide as in an updated May impact assessment report, the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), noted that the tourism sector saw a 22% decrease in international arrivals in the first quarter of 2020 with March, in particular, down by 57%.

“This translates to a loss of 67 million international arrivals and about $80 billion in receipts,” the organization said.

UNWTO forecasts that the overall decline for the year can range from 58% to 78%, which will mean putting more than 100 million tourism jobs at risk in what it calls “the worst scenario” — one which will put an abrupt end to a “10-year period of sustained growth since the 2009 financial crisis.”

Agoda, in a May 18 letter from its CEO John Brown, said it will be reducing its workforce by 1,500 while senior leadership members will be taking a temporary 20% pay cut starting June 1.

All of this is bad news, but Agoda is still optimistic about domestic travel recovering and has adopted measures to deal with the changes that will come once travel starts up again.

“We are seeing green shoots of growth in domestic travel in some key markets and anticipate that domestic travel will return before international travel,” the company told BusinessWorld, echoing the UNWTO report that “domestic demand would recover faster than international demand.”

“People will travel again, but there may be changes in how they travel,” Agoda said.

One of the changes, the company said, is there may be a need for more flexible booking options “in case [travelers] need to cancel in the last minute,” and so it introduced the EasyCancel feature which offers travelers free cancellation options should their plans change.

Agoda is also doing a campaign called GoLocal, focusing on domestic travelers and accommodations, to entice said travelers to “get the best deals they can when they are ready to travel,” the company said in the e-mail.

In the meantime though, the company compiled a list of virtual tours available online so people can still “experience the world” while they stay at home.

The tours it recommended are based on its travelers’ favorite destinations in 2019. The list includes a virtual tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (https://www.metmuseum.org/art/online-features/met-360-project) and virtual tours of the Namhansanseong World Heritage Center, Jeongak Pre-history Museum, and Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, all in South Korea (https://artsandculture.google.com/search/streetview?project=gyeonggi-1000-years-of-art-and-history).

In the Philippines, which placed 7th in the list of Agoda’s top destinations of 2019, the company listed a virtual tour of the Caramoan Islands in Camarines Sur (http://360virtualtourist.com/caramoan-islands/). — Zsarlene B. Chua

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