Travel is back and its not as bad as the news outlets would have you believe.

While travel is back, and the industry is moving again, a look across mainstream news outlets it’s difficult to see many positive stories. Be it passengers queued around the block outside Schiphol Airport, to unclaimed baggage in Heathrow Terminal 2, and endless stories of planes being rediverted because passengers, who needed to, hadn’t adhered to the mask-wearing policy. Though restrictions have been lifted for the US and Thailand has just removed its mask-wearing requirements, my experiences of Heathrow and Istanbul Airport, BA and Turkish and travel throughout Turkey were all rather… normal (I think we call it old normal, i.e. pre-pandemic).

It’s one of those situations now where the media outlets are creating problems which, whilst there, are not as widespread as they would have you believe. These events have all happened – people have been thrown off flights, a shortage of baggage handlers and border control has created issues, and flights have been cancelled. Dig a little deeper, though, and it’s not a systemic problem. Some issues are being blown up for the sake of a story. Those affected are unlucky to be caught up in this. Still, there were always going to be issues as travel returned in an environment with damaged infrastructure and numbers inflated after years of pent-up demand.

Travel is back. The industry invariably needs to work on some changes for itself, primarily ones that were highlighted not caused by the pandemic, but it’s not in a bad place so let’s stop all this noise. Above all else, for those of us passionate about travelling or needing it for business, let’s think back to not too long ago when it wasn’t available to us and give ourselves, and the industry, a break.