Where are you going to go when this is all over?
It seems to be what everyone I know is talking about at the moment, a by-product of lockdown being swapping fantasies about your next holiday.
Understandable, really. You do start to go a bit stir crazy. The farthest I’ve been since February is the Co-op.
I didn’t book anything for the summer. Always been more of a Teletext man.
But I know lots of people who are going through the process of cancelling their long-planned holidays.
And the horrible mess of trying to get cash back from the airlines.
It’s sad. We could all do with a holiday at the end of this but that seems a long way off.
However painful the process is, it pales in comparison when you consider the state of the travel industry.
British Airways’ announcement that 12,000 jobs might go shows the depths of the crisis and Ryanair revealed they were going to lose 3,000 in a sector that could take five years to come back to normal. Unless some action is taken, many more will follow.
It was always an industry that was going to be hit hard, but I’m not sure many predicted job losses and a collapse on this scale.
It’s clear that airlines need help. But it’s got to be more constructive than a bailout. easyJet paid out 50 per cent of its pre-tax income in dividends between 2015 and 2019.
And Wizz Air – which has just restarted flights out of Luton – has paid a tax rate of 3.5 per cent during the past five years.
There were suggestions last month that politicians were seriously looking at how jobs could be saved and the sector reformed.
Give them conditional bailouts. But the price is that no jobs are lost, the Government takes a stake, and they start paying their fair whack in taxes.
There are plans to look at this stuff, apparently, but they are complicated and might not happen. That’s not reassuring when 15,000 jobs are about to disappear.
We need to be thinking about this kind of thing now.
And in the Government, they are. New dad Boris was back this week, announcing we have passed the peak, but he added it’s by no means over yet.
If this were Jaws we’d still be working out what size boat we need.
But there are already certain sections of the economy limbering up and getting ready to fling open their doors again. They reckon the resurgence will be led by garden centres and fast food chains and, God have mercy on us, a certain discount pub chain is already switching on the fruit machines.
I can’t wait for lockdown to lift but until I’m sure everything is OK I’d worry about going back out.
I don’t know what it would take –maybe a flight somewhere hot would tempt me.
Yeah, somewhere close like Spain for a bit of late summer sun, a beach and a cold beer.
I might chance it for that. But not, I’m afraid, for a Wetherspoons. No way. Not even for Steak Night.
