Over 27% plan to go to the beach once travel restrictions are lifted: survey

Lori Pennington-Gray, Tourism Crisis Management Initiative Director at the University of Florida, joins Yahoo Finance’s Seana Smith to discuss how the travel industry is being impacted by COVID-19.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to the Ticker. The travel industry was effectively brought to a halt a couple of months ago as people, really, around the world were ordered to stay home. But, with states now here in the US relaxing their restrictions, what can we expect for the travel industry going forward. And, for that, I want to bring in Lori Pennington-Gray, director of the Tourism Crisis Management initiative at the University of Florida. And, Lori, thanks so much for joining us today.

Let me just get right to it and ask you, how do you think COVID-19 will affect future travel behavior? Because we know more and more people are a little bit hesitant, at least at this point, to book their next vacation.

LORI PENNINGTON-GRAY: All right. Thanks, Seana. Thanks for having me. Exactly right. The anxiety levels that are being expressed about travel have been fairly stable over the last six weeks. But we did see a huge spike in early March, where people were expressing more anxiety about what their future travel intentions were going to look like, than what they are right now.

I think there is some concern that there's a lot of variability in the industry. And there's a lot of touch points in the travel experience. And being able to control all of those aspects of the travel experience give people a little-- a bit of anxiety about what their experience might look like.

SEANA SMITH: Lori, is there any-- or, I guess, differences, I should say, demographic-wise, there's any demographic differences within these results? Because we know, obviously, like, the older population is more susceptible and more at-risk of when they do contract coronavirus.

LORI PENNINGTON-GRAY: Exactly. So, with the travel anxiety index, we are seeing that the older populations have slightly higher levels of anxiety than the younger populations. And that would make sense, based on how the nature of the virus is affecting older populations.

SEANA SMITH: And, when people are booking their next trip, I guess the big question is, what are people favoring? Do you have any indication now just in terms of where people are planning to go or how they are planning, I guess, to spend their time, whether they're going to go to a hotel or Airbnb or, I don't know, maybe even possibly a cruise down the line?

LORI PENNINGTON-GRAY: Right, so we do ask two questions, one about what their first trip is going to look like when they're allowed to travel. And, interesting, over the last three weeks, it's been the same response, that the beach is the most likely type of experience that they're looking for followed by actually going to parks, either national or state level parks. And this makes some sense. They're outdoor experiences. They're able to social distance a little bit easier than in a confined environment. We saw similar behaviors after 9/11 as well, where people were looking for outdoor experiences where there were more opportunity to, you know, control your own experience, if you are hiking in the backwoods or, you know, being able to look at the beach and move down the beach if there were too many people in a certain area.

SEANA SMITH: And, Lori, my question to you is, in general, the travel industry has been pretty resilient to setbacks and rebounds fairly quickly. Do you expect that to be the case for this situation? Just because we don't know-- we don't really have an end in sight. A lot of health experts that we have on the show are saying that we have to wait until there's a vaccine. And that could be 12 to 18 months out in the best case scenario.

LORI PENNINGTON-GRAY: Right, I think exactly right. You know, the industry has been resilient across a number of different crises, whether those are natural disasters or health-related crises like SARS or H1N1. So we do rebound quickly. And we're very resilient.

So I would say this is different than what we've ever experienced before. And the research that we're conducting also suggests that the industry is expected be more proactive in their response, that people are going to wait six months to a year after they've been told that they can travel before they actually travel. And some of that is to see whether the industry is being responsive to their safety and implementing the types of protocols that are necessary so that, when they do engage, that they won't get sick.

So that may take a little bit longer based on how we see the industry respond. For all intents and purposes, if they're waiting six months to a year before they're actually going to book and start to travel again, it could be even longer if the experiences are not what they expect when they get there. They may recede in that kind of behavior as well.

So you're right. A lot has yet to be seen. The industry has multiple different sectors. And so each one of those, collectively, is going to make up for that travel experience. And, if one part of that experience is not as responsive, then it will affect everybody out. So it's a collective joint effort to ensure the safety of that visitor.

SEANA SMITH: All right, Lori Pennington-Gray, director of the Tourism Crisis Management Initiative at the University of Florida. Thanks so much.

LORI PENNINGTON-GRAY: Thank you.