The quarantine imposed confronted society with the impotence and adversity of living in a prolonged confinement, allowing people to do more introspective during “free” time, and after months, it generated more awareness of the desire we all have to travel to favorite places, some of which are highly visited , others still in the bucket list.
Will we overcome the fear of traveling? What will make us want to get out of our comfort zone? Will we go back to sightseeing like before? Will society learn to abide by biosecurity measures? The Visitor – El Visitante shared these and other questions with the sociologist Danilo Toro, so that he could give us insight into how a person and the overall society will be able to satisfy the desire to “Get out of the Cave” to once again enjoy going to the country side or traveling abroad.
Tourism as Migration
This activity allows people to move “beyond any barrier, biological, social, political, geographical, climatic or economic,” said sociologist Toro, who adds that tourism gives us the benefit of pleasure and has diversified as a leisure mode: health and education among others.
It must be understood – the expert clarifies – that, despite the scope and depth of the crises caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, human beings will not stop traveling from one place to another. “Before this crises, there have been more adverse situations and man has overcome them,” said Toro, referring to shocking events such as the terrorist acts of 9/11 2001, when the weaknesses in public safety and security were revealed, also the vulnerability of the international air transport system, the Madrid (2004), London (2005) and Paris (2015) attacks.
The hotel infrastructure has also been the focus of terrorism such as the attacks in Bombay in 2008 and 2019, or Nairobi in that last year. Despite these events, tourism continues to be an unstoppable activity, said the Sociologist. “None of this, no matter how bad it has been, has ever stopped the human from doing tourism. Neither the evil of the human being himself, nor the surprising shocks of nature, like the 2004 Tsunami in Indonesia ”.
The Fear of Traveling will be Overcome
The natural reaction that causes us to be alert to threats is fear. That is usually positive to evaluate better our behavior, but it can turno into a problem when it becomes panic. “Panama will be able to overcome the fear that the pandemic has produced, with reliable and timely information on how the disease is prevented; the importance of keeping sanitary and distancing measures, and the importance of vaccination. The role of the State here is crucial and unavoidable ”warns the expert.
Resilience, the Next Step
From his perspective as a professional, Toro bets that human ingenuity will prevail. He emphasized that the Covid-19 vaccine will be one more requirement to travel internationally or locally, as other vaccines have been. The human being will build resilience, overcome these crises and use this experience to face the new challenges that will come in the future.
The sociologist emphasizes that an environment with public safety and health security should reign in the tourist offer. “A country that is unsafe in terms of health will not sustain or attract the type of tourism that best suits it,” Toro said.
The Tourism We Must Build
After learning the lesson, you must move forward and reinvent yourself along the way. We will have to create a different educational model, work on economic recovery, and propose that tourism be reactivated be more sustainable over time, suggested the expert. “Society must focus and appropriate these characteristics and in the cultivation of psychosocial or generic competences, especially in young people (misnamed soft competences), for which it will have to abandon the culture of improvisation and institutionalize the culture of planning. and timely execution”.
The countries that first manage to understand how much local social behavior weighs and that manage to generate the necessary adaptations, said the Sociologist. He also asserted that Panama has to start from an immediate basic agreement between the different components of key sectors such as tourism, to convene, plan and forecast. At the same time, they must demand from the public sector what it has to do in relation to what is agreed in comprehensive terms.
“Tourism today, highly affected, will recover” commented the expert, however he reiterated that all Panamanians must have the willingness to plan and act in the long term, if the economy is to recover and it begins to feel more durable.
