With Reuters reporting a 700 per cent increase in searches for flights to America on BA’s website after the US announced its easing of travel restrictions from next month, it seems travel, and even long-haul, is firmly back on the agenda.

“As long as we’re alive, there will be travel,” says Ian Schrager, legendary hotelier and Studio 54 co-founder. “No question about it. I can’t tell you when it will get back to where it was, but it’s not going to be very long.”

How we travel, however, will most certainly be “slower and longer,” London travel PR expert Julia Perowne, counters. This summer might have been about “fly and flop” destinations closer to home, but next year, she knows families are already plotting big bucket-list adventures to do together, possibly with three, even four, generations in tow. Africa, South America, Belize and Costa Rica are all on the agenda. “Travel will be about getting to a place and really enjoying it – staying for seven or eight nights, and in the case of a destination like Matetsi, near Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, it will be about going on safari but also spending the day in the spa, another day luxuriating with a long lunch and good wines overlooking the Zambesi, listening to the hippos growl in the distance,” she enthuses.

For other travellers, conscious of their carbon footprint but still lusting after adventurous luxury, new resorts such as the Nina Flohr’s Kisawa Sanctuary might appeal. Set on 300 hectares of forest, beach and sand dunes on Benguerra Island, off Mozambique, the recently-opened hotel has been built in tandem with its own marine research facility – and the hotel’s tourism directly contributes to funding research into understanding and protecting the local marine ecology.

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