Slow Budget Travel

By Patrick Robertson

The global pandemic has caused a major disruption in the tourism industry. One of the main problems has been with staffing. This includes restaurants, hotels, and airlines.

We are seeing all kinds of problems with airline flights in the past few months as people start to travel again. The airlines have been unable to handle the upsurge in bookings as their staffing levels are below pre-pandemic levels. This has included major problems with computer systems, flight cancellations, lost luggage, and people stranded for weeks.

Recently Westjet cancelled all of its direct European flights this summer from every city across Canada except Calgary. Their strategy is to solidify staffing through the hiring and  training of new staff at their Calgary headquarters. Once staffing is at an appropriate level, they will reopen routes and be in a better position to service customers.

The staffing shortages seems to be world-wide. When you look at the history of past pandemics, there has always been a labour shortage for several years following the pandemic.  In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, the shortage has resulted from the deaths, people quitting, and changing their jobs along with the great retirement, all of which has led to an increase in staff shortages.

The good news is that labour always benefits through the increase of salaries due to the shortage of workers. A few years ago, the news of the day was of increasing the minimum wage. Businesses resisted the increase, saying that wages were market driven and we have seen that statement come true with increases of 30% with a corresponding increase in the cost of all products.

The Great Retirement, as it is being dubbed, is going to have a huge impact upon tourism over the next decade. In the United States, the retirement level is 1.5% higher than it would be prior to the pandemic. In addition the massive baby boomer cohort has been steadily moving into normal retirement age of 65-70. In the USA this translates to approximately 10,000 people a week for the next five years.

That amounts to three million retirees and although many of them will not be travelling internationally the ones who do will certainly have a tremendous impact on close holiday destinations such as Mexico.

In Hawaii we have already seen a rapid increase in real estate prices that is driving up the rent rates to astronomical levels. Places that we used to rent for $2,000 a month five years ago are now costing up to $10,000 a month for the same place.

This year we spent the winter in Puerto Vallarta and have noticed that the real estate prices here are also rising astronomically and are going to continue to rise as Americans and Canadians flock to this area.

There are several reasons for this. This includes the pent-up demand for travel as a result of the pandemic, the close proximity of major population areas with direct flights, the great retirement and Puerto Vallarta being identified as one of the most desirable places in the world to retire.

The price of four star hotels has more than doubled the pre-pandemic rate with hotel rooms costing $600 a night. Monthly condo rentals in desirable areas are $6,000 per month if you can find a place.

We ended up in Puerto Vallarta because our house rental in Panama fell through. As we were already going to be in Puerto Vallarta for two weeks we thought we would just stay there. We spent a month trying to find acceptable accommodations for six weeks. We finally found two separate condos to rent. When we arrived the first condo was not what was advertised and we left immediately.

We walked down the beach going into every beach resort hotel to see if they had any cancellations. Luckily, we were able to book into a wonderful resort on the beach.  We took a closer look at the second condo rental and ended up cancelling it as well. We were able to spend the rest of our time split between two resorts that ended up costing four times what it was initially going to cost us to rent the condos.

This was entirely new for us. The only other time we had spent any time at a resort was back in 2007. It is quite a novel experience to spend eight weeks in resorts. That is the topic of next month’s column.

e-KNOW file photos

– Patrick Robertson is a travel writer and long-time resident of Fernie. He is an expert in planning independent travel and finding budget travel deals. Go to his website for more information and pictures of this trip to Vidanta Nuevo Vallarta.

Read more travel articles like this HERE. Like him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/budgetslowtravel for travel tips.

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