Governments should help people rather than bail out airlines, top travel specialist tells Boom Bust

A new report from the United Nations World Tourism Organization has said global tourism will drop by 70 percent in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

RT’s Boom Bust brought in Gary Leff, author of the View from the Wing website, to talk about the future of the travel industry, and particularly the airlines.

According to Leff, global tourism is going to suffer a major hit, with the airline industry expected to be smaller in the future.

“The airline industry is going to come back more quickly domestically than it will internationally,” he says, explaining that many countries will continue to have increased restrictions in place.

“So, it’s going to [take] some time for the industry to recover,” Leff says, noting that leisure travel will come back sooner than international business travel.

Talking about the airline bailouts, he notes that providing more government aid to the airlines rather than the people “who are going to be ultimately transitioning into a new position somewhere else” won’t be the right thing to do.

For more stories on economy & finance visit RT's business section