Israel’s airlines face mass layoffs, bankruptcy

With long lists of travel restrictions and dashed dreams for summer tourism due to the emergence of the Delta variant, millions around the world are in immediate danger of losing their jobs.

According to Professor Yaniv Poria, a tourism expert from Ben-Gurion University’s Hotel and Tourism Management Department and academic director of its Eilat Campus, the travel sector has changed forever as a result of the coronavirus.

“I predict that our DNA, as far as the tourism industry goes, has been changed,” Poria said. “This could be the end of travel as we knew it.”

“Forget about the tourism of the 20th century,” he said. “It was so easy to move from one place to another, and now it’s also so easy for the coronavirus to move from one place to another.”

Poria estimates that airlines globally will be forced to significantly downsize and fire between 50% and 70% of their employees in the coming months. They will then have to engage in hiring sprees and bring on board workers temporarily in between pandemic waves and during the traditional peak tourism summer months.