Vivek Wadhwa - Fellow at Harvard Law School, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University

“The next leap forward will come from virtual reality, which is advancing at breakneck speed and will take us by surprise. Our business meetings, family vacations, and leisure activities will increasingly move into virtual worlds. A trip to Tahiti or Mars, perhaps? The holodecks from Star Trek are on their way."

Elizabeth Becker - Author of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism

“Smart travelers will trust places with good governance and health systems. They will take fewer trips and stay longer. They will see this pandemic as a forecast of what’s to come from the climate crisis. They will act like responsible citizens as well as passionate travelers."

Zoritsa Urosevic - Director of Institutional Relations and Partnerships at UNWTO

“Just listen to the people around you… everybody wants to go somewhere. Travel has become part of our DNA. We need this dream time and moment of retreat with ourselves, nature and other cultures.

But I think travellers are going to be different. This crisis has forced many of us to live locally and so we may think more about that when travelling internationally – seeking out local food, local purchases – and growing the local production of foods and goods for the benefit of everyone, but we will TravelTommorrow!"

Zurab Pololikashvili - Secretary-General of the UNWTO

“Crises are tragedies. But they can also be opportunities. They are inflection points. They are moments where we decide to either retreat or imagine a new future.

While the technology to transform tourism exists, it is the international political will to deploy those technologies that will determine the fate of this new vision of global travel."

Justin Francis - Founder and CEO of Responsible Travel

“Tourism is part of the problem for conservation. But it’s also part of the solution – and the crisis has illuminated its role in protecting and preserving nature and habitats. It has, however, also highlighted the dependence of some conservation programmes on the industry, and the need to develop sustainable economic opportunities, in addition to tourism, in partnership with local people.

A future-fit industry will have a greater sense of responsibility and duty of care to people and planet. It will be better regulated, more democratic and accessible."

Robert Cole - Senior research analyst specializing in lodging and leisure travel for research firm Phocuswright

“Travelers will likely consider staying in someone else’s residence to be riskier than a hotel. Vacation rentals may be less negatively impacted, but hotels will be touting their cleaning standards and the dedication of their staff to ensuring guest safety and security. It will be much more difficult for Airbnb and other short-term rental groups to establish and enforce standards across thousands of independent hosts."

Calvin Cottar - Director of Cottar’s Safaris, a luxury safari camp and villa in Maasai Mara

“The criteria for sustainable travel and eco-credentials for camps and lodges has to, in future, be hardened down to concrete and hard metrics. Then, the huge number of travel agents and destination marketing companies selling agencies have to rethink their strategies. They need to structure trips so that a guest is doing the planet better by traveling than not travelling."