On may 29, Gloria Guevara, President & CEO of World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) has delivered a keynote speech entitled "Post-Pandemic Recovery Trend of the Global Tourism"at the 2020 International Mountain Tourism Day Online Forum.

As the first heads of international organizations to speak out for the tourism industry in the fight against the COVID-19, Ms Gloria Guevara analyzed the impact of tourism on the global economy in terms of GDP growth, employment and tourism spending, and summarized 90 crises that have hit the tourism industry in the last two decades. She pointed out that the impact of the COVID-19 may cause the global travel and tourism industry to lose about 100 million jobs, resulting in a GDP contraction of about 30%. Therefore, she believed that the tourism industry should coordinate to ensure that effective global measures are in place, and that the use of emerging technologies and the development of protective measures could enhance the visitor’s experience of "seamless travel". At the same time, increased cooperation between public-private sector and the development of standards with public health experts to rebuild tourist confidence are essential, as is continued assistance to the travel and tourism industry.

The following is the full text of the speech:

Greetings from London, from WTTC, the World Travel & Tourism Council. I would like, first of all, to thank the International Mountain Tourism Alliance(IMTA) for this opportunity and invitation to address such an important audience on this conference. I would like to thank Mr. Dominique de Villepin for his leadership and the invitation, also Mr. Shao Qiwei, a good friend from all times and someone that have a lot of respect that we work very closely, and of course Mr. He, who’s the Secretary General, and all the distinguished guests and people that are joining us from all over the world in this important event.

Hopefully, you will find my presentation interesting and please countenance this important recovery.

For WTTC, we would like to share the view from the global private sector.

WTTC represents the global private sector. A little bit over 200 CEOs from around the world are our members, 30% are in Asia, 30% in Europe, 30% in America and 10% in the rest of the world. We represent every single industry from airports, airlines, cruises, destinations, everyone included in the ecosystem of travel and tourism.

So, we're very excited to be able to talk to you today what's going on with travel and tourism and also what we see in terms of recovery.

For the almost 30 years, we have been doing a lot of research. And this research has helped us to quantify the economic impact of travel and tourism around the world and especially in 185 countries that we measure how many jobs have been created on the impact to GDP. And we also do some specific research.

WTTC has defined our CEOs defined a couple of years about three priorities. Those priorities are related with Security and Travel Facilitation. How can we have more travel, make it easy for people to move around the world? Second, Crisis Preparedness, Management and Recovery. Because unfortunately, every single situation impacts travel and tourism. And third, Sustainable Growth. How do we make sure that travel is good for everyone and that will grow up sustainable. 

According to the numbers from last year 2019, travel and tourism, they contributed 10% of the world's GDP. And the travel and tourism grew 40% more than the economy. As you can see in this chart, for the last consecutive nine years, we have outpaced the growth of the global economy. And of course, last year was not an exception. 330 million jobs around the world, that's one in ten dependent on our sector. But what's more important here is that, from all the jobs that were created around the world, one out of four, were in travel and tourism. Domestic, 70% or 71% of the contribution, and 29% was international travel, which is very important. 

Asia-Pacific has been the region that for the last year has had the most significant growth. Almost 10% of the GDP in this region is the contribution for travel and tourism, and almost 10% of the jobs as well. While in average travel and tourism grew 3.5%, in the case of Asia-Pacific it was 5.5. Very impressive. And that was the largest region in terms of growth in the world for another consecutive year. 

Now China, also very impressive. They have done a fantastic job assigning the priority for travel and tourism for years.11%, according to our data, is a contribution for travel and tourism and 10% of the jobs. And at the same situation, when the world grew 3.5, China grows 6%, and for in the economy, 9.3% in travel and tourism almost three times that the global average.That's very impressive, considering the size of the economy. And we're basically saying that the public policies implemented and that coordination with the public-private sector is crucial for this type of growth. 

Something very interesting also that we see is that combination between leisure and business. 81% is leisure travel, and where mountain has an important contribution of course to this total, because it's the outdoors. It's the nature that very important for the economies of the world, and including China.

And then of course domestic and international. 86% of the contribution was from domestic travels.

Last year, we announced our relaunch of report that included the analysis of 90 different crises in the last almost 20 years, because the reality is every single situation has an impact, unfortunately, to travel and tourism from tourism or security challenges to outbreaks, natural disasters, or political instability. And as well you will see here, we classify those in four and we're trying to understand when and how we can recover faster and what exactly we did to do that recovery. 

You will see here that in average political instability had the greatest impact. And then of course the minimum was ten months. But the second was the outbreaks.The outbreaks has been an interesting case that Asia has a lot of experience. The first outbreaks took us more than 34 months to recover. The average was 19, and 10 months was the last and the minimum which is great because it means that we have learned from the past, and we have improved the recovery time frame. 

Unfortunately, we're living in an unprecedented situation. The crisis that we have seen from COVID-19 is five times the impact that we had from financial crisis in 2008. And a little bit over 100 million jobs around the world have been lost, have been impacted. As I say, this is the largest by far of all the crisis that we have seen in our generation and perhaps in the past generations. $2.7 trillion have been impacted. And why is such a big impact? Because travel and tourism is relevant, is 10% of the world GDP as I mentioned before. And one out of ten jobs depend on this sector. So that's why the domino effect has been devastating and significant around the world.