“I haven’t been organizing an extra-EU trek since March 2020, I haven’t worked for 16 months and with the Delta variant on the rise, I don’t see any prospects even from now to December”, says Daniele Tonani, owner of Focus World Services in Milan.
If tourism in Italy has seen a restart, if European tourism tries to resist difficulties and cancellations, long-distance tourism, from the paradises of the Asian sea to the crossings of African forests, is completely broken down.
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“We are dying,” literally wrote a group of over one hundred Italian tour operators specializing in non-European travel. They ask that the government take into account their situation, that they do not suspend the refreshments and intervene with a moratorium on layoffs and the blocking of layoffs, otherwise in the autumn they will be forced to leave many of their workers on foot.
“Travelers who, alone, are going to the Maldives, Mexico or the Caribbean do so in contravention of the ministerial provisions – the tour operators write – because the current legislation only allows trips made to the states party to the Shengen agreement and the United Kingdom, Andorra, the Principality of Monaco, Israel, Rwanda, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Canada and New Zealand ‘. In short, those who leave for tourism to long-range destinations today do so without guarantees: “We are rejecting important practices precisely to comply with the provisions that come from the Ministry of Health and the Interior, but now we have reached the end”, explains Alessandro Simonetti , owner of World Explorer.
Even the president of Assoviaggi, Gianni Rebecchi, calls for a quick intervention by Minister Garavaglia: “The information confusion of recent days on the Green pass has unleashed chaos, creating profound uncertainty and unjustified alarmism among travelers which led to a collapse in bookings and numerous cancellations, once again burying organized tourism, which had timidly restarted just in June ». Travel agencies and tour operators in our country have over 86 thousand employees, but without adequate support this sector risks disappearing.