It goes without saying that responding to a global lockdown situation is not without significant challenges for any business that requires extensive international travel for its operations to work.
But perhaps the biggest challenging factor has been the pace of continuous change impacting worldwide travel.
There are no consistent measures, and no consistent guidelines. Every nation has its own approach, and commonly a different approach depending on where your passport was last stamped.
And the varying measures are also changing all the time as countries respond to the different level of threat they are facing.
Thinking through every possible iteration of a crew’s journey is absolutely essential to avoid huge barriers. It is a very specialist skill to navigate all the additional questions that need to be answered in order to make crew travel work today, and to pre-empt the likely points in a journey that are susceptible to change. For our specialist travel advisors, this plotting for a journey of continuous change is now part of their daily routine.
The requirements to be able to enter different countries are changing all the time. In some cases as nations ease their own lockdown measures, they are in fact tightening the rules on international arrivals.
Whilst this is not a surprise as priorities shift towards reducing the risk of a new wave of coronavirus infections, it does mean that the impact of the pandemic on business travel is only just beginning. For the mining sector, continuous change is here for the long term.
