Remember airports? Or boarding passes and safety demonstrations? How about luggage conveyor belts, security checks or even sunny beaches?
It’s been at least a year and a half since most of us took a flight anywhere. Instead, we’ve been visiting virtual exhibitions, attending online conferences or making video calls.
Organisers have got better at doing them and we’ve learnt to get along with them out of necessity, but they don’t always beat actually being there. And you can’t actually get sand between your toes or really experience another culture without immersing yourself in the real thing. We may not miss business travel too much, but we sure miss those foreign holidays.
Lockdowns, closed borders and quarantines have hit the airline business hard over the last 18 months. How has it survived at all? How has it adapted? As we emerge slowly from the pandemic lockdown, we look at what shape the business is in and what happens next.
International air travel...