SA travel bans lead to a surge in summer holiday cancellations – with more than R1 billion lost
The South African tourism and hospitality sector say they have already lost more than R1 billion due to cancelled bookings over the festive season amidst travel bans due to the new COVID-19 variant, Omicron.
CEO of the Southern Africa Tourism Services Association (Satsa) David Frost said, “with these ill-advised travel bans and more countries adding South Africa onto their red-list, it is catastrophic for an industry that has already been battling to survive for the past 20 months.”
The World Health Organization technical lead on COVID-19, Maria Van Kerkhove has also added that “the travel bans are having an impact on global cooperation against the Omicron coronavirus variant causing some challenges for samples from our South African laboratories to be shipped out of the country in order to further research the properties of this new COVD-19
strain.”
Source: Business Insider & Aljazeera