Travel Association In US Welcomes Covid Relief Bill

The travel industry in the US is struggling to survive since the last 9 months due to the covid-19 pandemic. This is probably the most affected industry in the country as both domestic and international travel came to a standstill due to covid-19 restrictions across the country. In this situation, the covid relief package has come as a huge relief for the struggling travel industry in the US.

Us Travel Association president and CEO Roger Dow said that Washington has delivered a huge gift to US businesses and it will help them to recover from the slow down in the near future. He said that the industry had gone through a rough patch in 2020. The much needed legislative relief comes after lengthy negotiation between the Congress leaders. A bipartisan agreement was reached after a lot of negotiations that went on for many months. The covid relief package was delayed by a long duration due to the presidential elections.

Travel Association In US Welcomes Covid Relief Bill

Several provisions in the covid relief bill will ease the suffering of millions of workers in the travel industry. According to official estimates, close to 4.5 million jobs are lost in the travel industry in 2020. Given the situation, a lot of support is needed by the Federal government for the industry to bounce back to normal condition. The travel industry Association is expecting some important legislation in this regard that can give a boost to the industry in the near future.

As soon as the pandemic started in March, most of the travel destinations were shut down and the situation continued for several months. Apart from that, even the hotels and restaurants were affected due to social distancing guidelines. Even when the restaurants were opened to the public, most people did not come out due to the fear of covid-19 infection. This had a huge impact on the overall business of restaurants across the country.

The situation was so bad that several restaurants closed completely as they could not maintain the business with very few customers. Apart from that, restaurants and hotel industry had to invest a lot in order to follow the covid-19 protocols. Due to social distancing guidelines, the restaurants could not run to their full capacity and most of them had to alter their seating arrangements to accommodate the visitors.

While many restaurants shifted to online delivery mode to survive the pandemic, others could not get into this mode and they completely shut down the operations. The threat of getting infected was very huge in the early months of the pandemic and several employees also did not want to work at restaurants as it was considered a high risk place. Due to this situation, many restaurants were not able to do business in a normal way and they suffered a lot of losses for several months.

The situation for restaurants is somewhat better when compared to the hotels that depend on tourists. Several tourist destinations are yet to open completely due to covid-19 restrictions. Even the airline’s business took a huge hit due to this situation and many people did not want to travel to tourist destinations during the covid-19 situation.

Finally when the tourist destinations were opened to the public, there were a lot of restrictions and tourists had to get a covid test done before travelling to such places. They could visit tourist places only if the test was negative. Otherwise, they have to quarantine themselves for two weeks and go for another test according to the rules of individual counties and States. All these restrictions reduced the business for tourist destinations by a huge margin.

Millions of people who depend on the tourist industry lost their jobs due to this situation. The covid relief package has provided some relief to the industry workers. The travel associations are hoping for a further relief package in the next few months.