Experts recently voiced their concerns and predictions when the United States officially reopens to international non-essential travel on November 8, 2021.
Judging by the vaccine mandate put in place for foreign visitors, many argued that this will inevitably have an impact on the wait times that air travellers compared to before the pandemic.
Sherry Stein, chief technology officer for the Americas at the Société Internationale de Télécommunications Aéronautiques (SITA), expects a chaotic reopening that will continue into the near future.
Stein explained: “Before Covid, the trouble that we were facing as an industry was how to how to manage the continued doubling of passenger volumes because the airport infrastructure wasn’t prepared to scale to support that. Now, it’s how do we deal with the wait times for all of these manual, paper-laden processes with or without Covid? Because you still have to check visas and passports, you still have to do all these things. The expectation is that we could see wait times of up to eight hours.”