2020 – The Year When Travel Didn’t Happen

2020 is coming to an end, and this blog has been dead for a couple of months at least.

I started this blog a couple of years ago, as just a personal travel blog, due to my love and passion of traveling. I had also recently relocated to Hong Kong, and working at the airport I have both a personal and professional interest in the development and expansion of aviation in Hong Kong, and I wanted to document the progress of expanding to the 3rd runway. Also, living in Hong Kong opened up so many new destinations within just a couple of hours of travelling, so I was so excited to travel so many places.

My first year here I did great for traveling, 2019 I got to do a lot of traveling, but in 2020, like almost everyone else, I did almost no travel at all. 2020 was actually my worst year for traveling since 1993, both years I completed only 4 flights. in 1993 I only did one trip from Bodø via Trondhjem to Alicante and back, whereas in 2020 I did one trip from Hong Kong to Clark and one to Bangkok, so slightly better off I guess. But i will not bore myself by even making any statistics for it, as it would be pointless. 2019 was a lot better though.

I do not see 2021 being much better for traveling, but Ido hope that it will start picking up sometimes during the 2nd half of the year. Seeing that COVID-19 vaccines are being rolled out, and several countries opening up there is still hope that normality (the old normal, I don’t like the ‘new normal’) will resume at some stage.

As for aviation, I don’t think it can get much worse that in has in the last year. At least not here in Hong Kong. Passenger numbers are down 99% from the year before, and traffic numbers are down about 60%. Cathay Dragon is no more, and most of Cathay Pacific planes have ended up in storage in Alice Springs. The numbers of operators in and out of Hong Kong is probably down to about 20-ish from 150-ish a year ago.

If travel starts up again in 2021, most, if not all, my trips will probably be to the Philippines. For those of my readers who don’t know me, I have 2 kids there that I haven’t been able to visit since January 2020, so I will try to make up for that as much as I can whenever it becomes available again.

As for this blog, since aviation cannot get much worse than it is now, I will try to get back to posting updates what’s happening in the Hong Kong Aviation World, and I will finish my old trip reports that I lost interest in writing, as I was not traveling any more. In addition, I will try to gather as much information as I can here about restrictions etc in and out of Hong Kong (mostly for my own benefit, as I keep seeing news, but can never find the details when I need it).