Bridging cultures and connecting people

Multi-national Serena founded the award-winning SUITCASE while in her third year at NYU. Her accolades include being named as Forbes 30 under 30 (2017) as well as one of 25 under 25 most influential Londoners by the Evening Standard.

In 2018, she won a Woman of the Future Award for media and a Great British Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Queen of the long weekend, Serena is the team’s hotel aficionado. Her favourite micro-trip to date was Iceland and her most anticipated of the year is a road trip from Austin to Marfa.

Some say that the current pandemic will trigger radical changes across multiple sectors; do you see this happening in travelling? If yes, in which way?

People will experience a strange mixture of emotions – exhilaration of being able to leave their homes and the lingering fear that COVID-19 might come back. This will manifest itself in people heading to more sparsely populated areas at first – lesser known destinations or somewhere in nature. They’ll like to be in environments that they can control if possible – their own cars (that they can disinfect) or villas/ rented accommodation if possible.

For the first few months people will tentatively venture out to their neighbourhoods, wider areas that they live in and then travel domestically before going abroad. Hopefully, we will end up with travellers who think before they book and as a result the travel ecosystem will become a lot more sustainable for the future.

On the basis of your insights from your clients & partners, which destinations are showing the most resilience during this crisis, and which will be the first to recover?

Sparsely populated areas/ destinations will recover the most quickly or destinations that have controlled the disease carefully. We can see this already with states such as Alaska and countries such as New Zealand who are already coming out of lockdown as well as certain Asian countries who have done a good job at managing the situation.