The anticipation was fed earlier this week, on Sept. 13, when the CDC (U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) lowered its COVID-19 travel advisory for Brazil by one notch as the pandemic wanes in Latin America’s largest economy.
Brazil is now ranked as Level 3, or “high,” according to an update posted on the agency’s website. Travelers are still advised to avoid nonessential trips to the country, and make sure they are fully vaccinated if they do visit. The CDC had been recommending travelers avoid Brazil for more than a year. Were it not for the technical measures used by the CDC, the environment for travel to the USA from Brazil would probably be somewhere on a “10” on a scale of one to ten.
Consider the news bytes from two authoritative reports out of Brazil.
1. Conversion‘s E-commerce Sectors in Brazil Report, Tourism showed that tourism was the economic sector with the highest growth rate in July, compared to June.
⦁ Not only has the size of the industry begun to recoup, the data from Conversion’s E-commerce Sectors in Brazil Report indicated that more than nine out of ten Brazilians (91.9 percent) told researchers that they intend to take a leisure trip after vaccination and/or the end of the pandemic.
⦁ And of that 91.9 precent, 78 percent said that they intend to travel by plane after taking the second dose of the vaccine or completing the immunization. (The survey was carried out among 271 Brazilians connected to the Internet in order to better understand the growth of tourism and what are the expectations of tourists in relation to the future of their travels.)
⦁ Unemployment and the decrease in income of a large part of the population were some of the factors that impacted various sectors of the economy during the most critical periods of the pandemic, in addition to social isolation. As a result, tourist activities were strongly affected—according to data from the National Confederation of Commerce of Goods, Services and Tourism (CNC), they already add up to a loss of R$ 395.6 billion ($76 million) from March 2020 to June this year.
⦁ Many Brazilians are eager for the end of the pandemic to return to a more active travel routine. If before the social isolation it was already very good to travel, the expectation of being able to return to tourism practices makes 31 percent of those interviewed say that they will travel more than before the pandemic, whenever possible; the number is even higher among adults up to 30 years old, reaching 48 percent.
⦁ When asked about travel during the pandemic, about half (50.9 percent) of respondents said they were somewhat afraid of traveling, while 29.2 percent said they were not afraid of traveling.
⦁ However, some attitudes about safety procedures have changed, as the survey told us that 60.15 percent of Brazilians said that, even after the end of the pandemic, they will no longer use services from companies that do not follow the health safety protocols for preventing covid-19.
2. More data to shore up the optimism came from The Brazilian Overview Monthly Report for August. (The Overview is a joint project of Brazilian travel trade publisher, PANROTAS and FecomércioSP, a São Paulo-based business research organization.)
“Dear international partners and friends around the world,” José Guilherme Alcorta, CEO of PANROTAS, announced in presenting the report, “Brazilians are ready to fly international again, and are already doing it, to destinations that are open for us, such as Mexico, France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Egypt and, very soon, Canada (in September).”
⦁ A challenging scenario when there is an unemployment rate of 14.6% for a total of 14.8 million people out of the workforce. Although the number of formal job creation has been very positive throughout this year,
⦁ While he pointed out that readers should be aware that Brazil an unemployment rate of 14.6 16 percent for a total of 14.8 million people out of the workforce, the country’s two major consumer confidence indexes have gone above the 100 standard and the numbers of both seem to be on a growth curve.
⦁ A key measure cited in the report is that the country’s largest tourism source market in Brazil, São Paulo has 70 percent of its population vaccinated with at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and has begun vaccinating teenagers between 12 and 17 years old on August 15th. (The vaccination rate in the rest of Brazil is still at 50 percent.)
⦁ Answers from the second edition of the Insights for Tourism survey by TRVL LAB and ELO research and analyses make it clear: Brazilians want and will travel at the end of 2021 and in the summer of 2022. According to the survey:
—61 percent of Brazilians are planning leisure trips in the six months after fully vaccinated. –
—54 percent are planning to travel this year, in the second half. –
—75 percent will not reject the national preference: sun and beach. –
—81 percent indicate relaxing and resting as the main reason for the trip and
—64 percent want to have fun. Leisure travel dominates, with international travel being planned for 2022.
While short-haul travel and destinations at favored by those Brazilians who do travel, the report tells us that, should their borders open, “we are also ready to go to the United States, Portugal and Argentina.”
