By Aftab Rana
World travel and tourism came to a standstill in the beginning of 2020 as the pandemic of Covid-19 reached almost every country of the world. Governments started to restrict the movement of people in order to curb infections. By May 2020, almost all the countries imposed pandemic related travel restrictions and many of them closed their borders completely. Economically, this made travel and tourism the most affected sector by the pandemic as this impact continued till the beginning of year 2022.
The pandemic of COVID-19 in addition to impacting several other businesses and industries has also created enormous impact on the tourism and hospitality industry at global, regional, national and local levels. Instant travel restrictions and halting of hospitality services had an unparalleled impact. The sector’s demise has had far-reaching effects, particularly on the countries which were heavily relying on the foreign exchange earnings from inbound tourism. As tourism is truly a cross-cutting industry, the impact of decline in tourism due to the pandemic of Covid-19 were felt throughout the entire tourism ecosystem, including airlines, railways, cruise shipping, hotels, restaurants, tour operations, food and beverage suppliers, farmers, retailers and a wide range of other small and medium enterprises.
In Pakistan, tourism was growing faster than ever before in the Covid-19 breakout. Pakistan was named as the number one destination for 2020 by Conde Nast and various other tourism forums. The year 2020 was supposed to dictate the narrative for the years to come and was critical in terms of exponential growth of the overall travel and tourism sector in Pakistan. Tourism as a sector has been critical in banking significant revenues and employment opportunities. There was a prevailing sense of security and infrastructure improvements which were the major contributors in the significant spike.
According to the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), in 2019, tourism contributed to Pakistan’s GDP with US$18,727.7 million, adding handsome share of 5.8% in the total GDP. In 2020 and 2021, the travel and tourism sector’s total contribution reduced to USD 12,400 million (3.9% of total DGP) and USD12,769.5 million constituting 3.7% of total GDP respectively.
Like many other countries, Pakistan has been quick to act to minimize the effects of the pandemic on the tourism sector. PTDC at federal level constituted a National Tourism Recovery Action Committee (TRAC) to develop a short to midterm strategy and action plan to ensure quick recovery of tourism sector in the post Covid-19 scenario.
In April 2020, a tourism recovery strategy based on the following three pronged approach as mentioned below was formulated by TRAC.
1. Survival of the tourism industry and mitigating the impact of Covid-19
2. Revival of accelerated recovery phase
3. Positioning for the future to revamp tourism in post Covid-19
Based on this strategy, various incentives were offered to private sector such as waiver of DTS license renewal fee of hotels, travel agents, tour guides and tour operators, provision of interest free loan by SBP to solve the immediate cash flow problem of tourism and hospitality business and cash grants to low wages employees from Ehsas Program of Government of Pakistan.
The committee also developed SOPs for the different segments of tourism and hospitality to ensure the safe and sound tourism in Pakistan. Later on free training workshops and awareness sessions were organized across the country to train the tourism and hospitality service providers about the implementation of Covid-19 SOPs.
Good thing is that, the time of Covid-19 was effectively utilized by PTDC and the provincial tourism departments to continue work on developing various projects of tourism development and promotion in the country. Governments of Punjab and KP through the World Bank funded projects effectively utilized this time to strengthen institutional capacity, increase private sector engagement and improve infrastructure services to improve the performance of tourism sector in the province. KP Government has done remarkable work on developing master plans of four new Tourism Integrated Zones which have potential to attract an investment of around USD100 million to develop world class tourist infrastructure in the province.
Government of Balochistan has also started a project to prepare a master plan for the development of Makran Coast for marine tourism. In order to provide safe and secure environment to the visitors, the concept of Tourist Police was also introduced in Gilgit-Baltistan, AJK and KP province.
PTDC at Federal level has developed a National Tourism Strategy and Action Plan with a clear vision for next 10 years to accelerate the growth of tourism sector in the country by attracting new private sector investment, institutional reforms, human resource capacity building, infrastructure development, tourism marketing and promotion and improving cooperation among the concerned organizations and stakeholders. A comprehensive document of National Minimum Standards for Tourism and Hospitality Sector was also developed during this time in consultation with all the key stakeholders to improve the standards of services.
PTDC also developed an Integrated Tourism Plan for Islamabad by engaging all the key stakeholders. Efforts were also made during this time to arrange various workshops and webinars to develop B2B linkages with the tour operators of different countries with the help of Pakistani foreign missions in different countries. In this year, PTDC also launched various promotional campaigns on social media to promote the image of Pakistan besides developing a Tourism Brand to highlight Pakistan as a tourist friendly destination. One of the landmark initiatives of federal government was setting up a Tourism Promotion Endearment Fund with one billion seed money. The income from this fund will be exclusively used to participate in leading international tourism expos to attract more foreign tourist traffic to Pakistan. This year, PTDC along with provincial tourism bodies and private sector has decided to participate in four leading tourism events such as WTM London, Travel and Adventure Show New York, ITB Berlin and ATM Dubai. It is hoped that this will bring good result to put back Pakistan on global tourism market.
As a whole, this year saw a remarkable boost in the domestic tourism to the mountain areas. As per careful estimates, more than 5 million domestic tourists visited tourist sites in different areas. Foreign tourism has also started showing good results as international arrivals to Pakistan which declined significantly after the outbreak of Covid-19 have picked up once again. Presently, the data is not available but it is estimated that in 2022 tourism growth will once again reach to the level of Pre-Covid level of 2019.
