【Record】Ms. Gloria Guevara, President & CEO of World Travel & Tourism Council, delivers a keynote speech on the forum of New Normal of Tourism amid COVID-19

Gloria Guevara: Hello, my name is Gloria Guevara. Thank you for inviting me. I work for World Travel and Tourism Council. I am the CEO and President. Thanks to the World Tourism Cities Federation for this important invitation and greetings from London.

As you probably are aware, WTTC or the World Travel and Tourism Council represents the global private sector. So it's an honor and a pleasure to share with you a global view of what is the current state. WTTC represents a little bit over two hundred CEOs from around the world. 30 percent of them are in Asia, 30 percent in America, 30 percent in Europe and 10 percent in the rest of the world. And we covered all the industries from airlines, airports, tour operators, travel companies, the entire ecosystem. Currently our chair is Christopher Nassetta, the CEO of Hilton Worldwide and our vice chair from China is Jane Sun from Trip.com.

So we have a very diverse group of powerful individuals who define their strategy for the sector globally. And it's exactly our prior. We have a lot of members in China. We are very happy for that, and also within the region that they create a lot of jobs. Now WTTC for 30 years have done a lot of research. We have been able to quantify the economic impact for travel and tourism. In 185 countries around the world, we made a measure of travel and tourism on the economic effect. That's how we know that we contribute 10 percent of the global GDP.For the last nine consecutive years, we have outpaced the growth, as you can see in the chart here, the growth of the economy, last year of course, was not the exception

As you'll see in the green chart, travel and tourism GDP has outpaced the economy. Last year, we grew by 40 percent more, with 3.5 versus 2.5, 330 million jobs around the world depend on our sector. That's one of ten. And the most important numbers that I like from this chart, is when you look at all new jobs created globally, in travel and tourism, one out of four were in our sector. That considers all the industries all the sectors, one out of four were in travel and tourism. Now this COVID, this outbreak, this crisis has been very important around the world, and of course, when we look at the importance of Asia-Pacific, where it started also has been significant.

While in the world is ten percent, as you can see here in Asia-Pacific is almost the same 9.8 percent and the employment is almost 10 percent. Very impressive the growth that we have seen in Asia, as you can see here. Not only the economy average was 4.2 percent, the travel and tourism was 5.5 percent, almost doubled than the average of the global growth, which is very impressive to all the world. That has been happening in the region.

Now, as I said before, if we look at the country, you will see that China has been a very important country globally. Amazing job has been done by the government and by all the players of the ecosystem of the private sector. 11 percent, a little over 11 percent is a contribution for travel and tourism. And again we quantify direct, indirect and induced, so we thought this is the total contribution. 10 percent of employment and, as I said before, while the world grew an average 3.5 percent, China grew an impressive 9.3 percent almost three times the average globally, which is amazing.

The growth in travel and tourism, congratulations for that, and then of course, the economy grew 6 percent. Now because we are so big and so important, this sector, the impact of travel and tourism has been also significant. 121 million jobs have been impacted. That when we started measuring 50 then 100, current state is 121 million jobs have been impacted and if we don't get to this trial, we don't recover accordingly, that number can grow up to 197, which is significant. Now, at the same time, when you look at the impact, if there is something that can be done and had a minimum effect, you will see that for every million jobs, and every million travelers that we can make, we can have also a lot of jobs back. So that's why these coordinated effort and work is so important to recover some of the jobs that have been impacted already. Moving to the next slide. You will see that if we do a good job as they say, by regions like in Asia-Pacific, one extra or one million trips can bring 1.7 billion dollars. So the work from everyone, especially the cities and from all of us, can be very powerful and can help us to recover faster.

Now, moving to the next slide, you will find also that we do a lot of research, not only to quantify the economic impact, but also we look at and what has been learned from the past. Asia has a lot of experience with outbreaks, but unfortunately, in Europe and America we don't have the same experience. Last November we issued a report what we look at 90 different situations, and from these situations we grouped them in 4 from natural disasters weather related, for instance, outbreaks, political instability or security related, very important here we believe WTTC to learn from the past. Three lessons that I want to highlight, based on the report that we issued last November.

The first one is 9-11. 9-11 is probably you remember that happened in September, 2001, with an unfortunate situation that we had in New York and the situation was so severe that the impact was significant to the travel and tourism globally, but at the same time the recovery took longer, almost four years, and one of the reasons was because we work in silos. We didn't, countries didn't work in a coordinated way or a coordinated approach with the private sector, and they established safety and security protocols totally independent, that created a lot of confusion with travelers. And that's why it took us longer to rebuild that trust, and because it took us longer, it took us almost four years to recover. And we need to learn to have the same protocols globally. That's why it's a very important lesson to learn from 9-11.

Second lesson is 2008, the financial crisis impacted globally as well, and unfortunately, in this case it was also significant impact. It was the greatest before COVID in terms of the negative impact to the sector. However, we recover pretty fast. It was a V-shaped diver recovery, was almost 18 months and the reason is because the G-20 platform was created. We work in a coordinated way. Public and private collaboration was essential and we were able to recover pretty fast. We knew exactly what was going to happen and by when. And this coordinated effort was instrumental to the recovery, so we need to work together.

Third lesson learned, and especially coming from Asia and Africa is that we were able to travel after SARS, MERS, and EBOLA. That we didn't have to wait for a vaccine and the reason was because we were able to isolate the people infected, that was very important, and that's what we talk about testing, contact tracing how relevant that is in order for us to recover the jobs that have been impacted and re-establish travel and tourism.

So in conclusion, there are some lessons learned from this report that we want to make sure that we don't make the same mistakes. So moving on to the next slide, we have defined the four principles for recovery. These four principles are crucial for the recovery. The first one is from the 2008 financial crisis, as I mentioned before, this coordinated approach is crucial to re-establish operations to reopen borders and removal of barriers. We believe that domestic is gonna be recovered first. We're very encouraged, very happy with a recovery that we have seen in China so far and some other countries in Asia. Hopefully the rest of the world will move in the same direction. However, there are importance to resume international travel, and when the time is right, we recommend creating air corridors that have an alignment between the medical tourism and the political will, and also removing, replacing quarantines or blanket quarantines for more as specific and untargeted quarantine. So the city has an issue that the city can be locked down and then you have a quarantine with that city, but not with all the international travelers, for instance. That's a lesson learned that's very important to rebuild trust from the traveler.

The second one is we need to look at their travel experience. There's going to be a before and after the vaccine. After the vaccine is gonna to be easier. Once we all get the vaccine, it will go in your reservation and it's gonna be easier. Before we have the vaccine, testing and contact tracing is very important. In this case, for instance, China has done a lot of testing and some countries such as South Korea and Japan have done a lot of testing as well.

Here in Europe, in some countries they have done a lot of testing. The US is also doing a lot of testing. It's very important to include testing, contact tracing in the travel experience, either have a test before departure or on arrival and isolate the sick people. This is a lesson we learned from previous outbreaks. Yes, COVID, 80 percent is symptomatic, but we need to be able to isolate the sick people. Third, very important also, the protocols. As we learn from 9-11, because of the lack of consistency and safety screening at the airports, we had different protocols in place. It took longer to recover. That's why, this time from the global private sector, we are sharing a lot of information. We have to find the safe travel protocols. And we have more than 70 destinations and countries so far that they are aligning their protocols with ours. So they are pretty standard and that will help us to recover trust from traveler. Some lessons learned from the outdoor shopping protocols came from China, from Shanghai, from the protocols that they implemented there. We took that knowledge and that knowledge was shared for Europe and the rest of the world. So a lot of sharing of knowledge and expertise went to these protocols, and this is very important to rebuild trust from the traveler.

Last but not least, is to continue the support from governments in terms of financial aid, incentives, liquidity, and of course, the promotional aspect very important as well. So these four protocols, I mean, four principles are very important, including of course the protocols. It will move to the next slide. Basically, let me elaborate a little bit more on what we have done with the protocols. As I said before, the knowledge from the outdoor shopping came from Shanghai from China that was included in the protocols that we have for our shopping globally. Now our members, the hotels, they are a part of the WTTC, offer their rooms to doctors and nurses is an example, and they have been able to maintain those installations COVID free that knowledge was a support from WHO and CDC and other medical experts was included in the protocols. And, as you can see here, all these brands sign up with the protocols, that so far we have 10 different protocols globally by industry or by protocol that we have been able to announce, from hospitality, and of course, with ICAO, IATA and ACI we worked for aviation and airports. We have conventions and has to do with meetings and events, tour operators, outdoor shopping that I just mentioned, attractions, car rental, short term rentals and others, so they are very important to guarantee that we offer the same experience. The travelers should expect the same. If they take a flight, if you wear the mask, you should wear it all the flights and it's the same situation with the rest.

Now we, our members, now as WTTC, we created as a stamp. This is the stamp to help the travelers to identify exactly who has implemented the protocols and organizations like Trip.com has helped us to promote this stamp. This stamp has been endorsed by UNWTO. And of course, it was adopted by the G-20 Chair, which is Saudi Arabia, the G-20 countries. The benefit of this stamp is for the traveler to know that they have implemented these protocols. The private sector has implemented the protocols and the governments as well. So here you will have some of the 70 destinations that they have endorsed and embraced our protocols, destinations from Europe, as you can see, the Middle East countries, a lot of the destinations, we still review, and we have like a hundred in the pipeline, so very important to be in line here, and I invite cities to work with us, so that we can communicate the protocols that you have implemented and at the same time, at the end of the day, the goal is to rebuild trust from the travelers. And the cities play a very important role, of course. Because tourism to the cities is huge, is relevant and is very important for the recovery.

Next slide, we also talk about the importance of wearing a mask and basically this is one that we learn from Asia, and I want just to highlight that how the Eastern and in this case, Europe, and America and other regions, are learning more and more from Asia, because Asia has a lot of experience in outbreaks and for years they have been wearing the mask. And the mask is one that we have been promoting a lot, because according to the experts, if we all wear the mask, we can get this situation under control.

That's all for now, thank you very much for inviting us. Here you have the email from Haybina that can share with you the presentation and more details, and thank you again for having WTTC to be part of this important session.