Despite the hospital intensive care units buckling again and the death toll already surpassing 2020 numbers, officials are reluctant to reopen the lockdowns. The result is arbitrary restrictions that vary by city: Chicago enacted an indoor masks mandate Tuesday, joining Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, DC; New York City Requires Proof of Vaccination for Indoor Dining; While in Las Vegas, event organizers are exempt from the state mask requirement indoors if they can demonstrate that all attendees are fully vaccinated.
Updated
Aug. 21, 2021, 10:11 p.m. ET
But as sporting events progress, restaurants continue to sit indoors and outdoors, and music festivals like the recent Lollapalooza in Chicago determine whether the shows will go on, the decision whether to travel or not is now a personal one.
The reactions to the delta variant are correspondingly different. Zeta Global, a marketing tech company tracking American travel behavior, reports an inverse trend based on vaccination status: hotel stays in states with high vaccination rates have declined in recent months, and trips to hotspots like Florida are among those against Covid-19 19 are vaccinated, but has gained weight in those who are not.
Southwest and Frontier Airlines lowered their earnings expectations this quarter as flight demand slackened. Many airlines were betting on an increase in business travel this fall, which was only just beginning to recover. But as companies, including Facebook and Coca-Cola, are scaling back their plans for going back to the office in the face of the variant, fears that business travel will return to a full streak.
“We observe two different consumer behavior. One is when you make a decision with your own dollars and one when you make a decision with your company’s dollars, ”said Jan Freitag, senior vice president of Accommodation Insights for STR, a hospitality research firm.
Ron Bension, President and Chief Executive of ASM Global, the world’s largest event management company, said that due to the long lead time of conventions and large business events, Delta has simply extended the status quo created in March 2020 and has already canceled. What we’re seeing isn’t a lot of rebooking, ”he said.
For Americans hungry for travel, the Delta variant has brought back a practice well sharpened by the pandemic: waiting.
