Travellers will adapt to the new realities of post-COVID-19 travel, but should we simply return to old habits as quickly as possible or use the current situation to change the industry’s bad habits and create a new and better future for travel and the world?

Bruce Poon Tip believes in the latter, so much so that the G Adventures founder has written and published the insta-book “Unlearn: The Year the Earth Stood Still” – a “heartfelt love letter” to travellers and the travel industry that urges “you, me and every traveller in the global community to rethink, restart, and rejuvenate the idea of what travel should be and could be on the other side (of the pandemic).”

“We’ve been carefree, and some would say reckless, up till now with tourism,” says Poon Tip, who launched the Planeterra charitable non-profit foundation in 2003 “to raise money to do good things around the world” and who also penned the New York Times bestseller “LoopTail: How One Company Changed the World by Reinvesting Business” in 2013.

“Sometimes when you’re doing ridiculous things… you just have to stop and look back and say, ‘Wow, that was crazy, and we were insane to be doing what we did,” he observes. “And I think we’re in that same situation. Tourism has just stopped and we’re looking back and it’s pretty crazy what we’ve been doing with tourism and the planet.

“My hope,” he adds, “is people will just stop and look and say, ‘Maybe we have to rethink this; maybe we should take more than a minute to look back and see the crazy shit we’ve been doing and say, we can be so much better than this, as a collective industry and as travellers.’”

So, what does that look like? Poon Tip has some suggestions:

Attitude change: “We in the developed world have a privilege to travel, we don’t have right to travel. That’s a mindset that significantly has to change… When you do (travel), do it consciously: ask questions and do it in a way that’s not reckless and strictly motivated by price. And do it a way that matches the values you have at home. You can’t suspend the values you have at home just because it’s cheap or you’re going to another country. That has to stop.” He cites, for example, consumers who choose to travel with known cruise companies that dump garbage in the ocean, yet who conscientiously recycle at home.

Spread wealth: Take local taxis, pay people for services, and “most importantly, don’t ever leave a country without having a local meal with a local person.”

Care about the destination: “Connect to destinations – that’s my number one message,” he says. “Because right now the travel industry is selling people on amenities. There’s a race to build bigger ships, have bigger compounds, and to have more amenities – the latest cruise ship that has now a go-cart track on it, that’s the most insane ridiculous thing ever! The destination becomes irrelevant and that’s no longer travel in my mind.”

Of course, a global travel reset isn’t as simple as a few talking points. Poon Tip goes into greater detail in “Unlearn,” but he also says it’s a conversation that the travel industry “needs to have” and one where “we collectively have to stick together as an industry. It’s not us against them in a more competitive environment as our industry tends to be. We need to support each other.

“Travel’s always done good, whether we travellers have thought about it or not,” he continues. “But it can do a lot more good when we know what we’re doing, and why. We’ve been doing good, but after the pandemic, let’s see if we can do better.”

Download a free version of the insta-book via Amazon, Apple Books or Kobo, or click www.unlearn.travel