Travelers Learn to Live With Permanxiety

25.08.2023 - 14:34 / skift.com / Sean Oneill

Travel has always offered an escape from the ordinary. But it has classically offered escapism by creating what you might call “sensory deprivation bubbles.” It conjured the fantasy that troubles didn’t exist within the space of their resorts, cruise ships, theme parks, and first-class cabins. 

The pandemic poked holes in that approach, forcing the travel sector to acknowledge it with masks, safety protocols, and service disruptions even in the most secluded of its hideaways. Industry leaders were surprised to discover that most travelers welcomed companies acknowledging the alarming reality. Even though everyone wished things were otherwise, outright denial would have been wrong. 

Some travel executives are now extrapolating that lesson to apply to how they address the pervasive worries many consumers have on multiple fronts today. 

Skift coined the term “permanxiety” in 2017 to describe how social, political, and climate turmoil is coloring consumer expectations of everything, including travel. We noted at the time that “travelers endure a barrage of worries about terrorism, security, neo-isolationism, racial tension, Trumpism, technology and its adverse role, the widening economic gap, culture wars, climate change, and other geopolitical and local issues.” 

Since then, the list of worries has lengthened to include rising inflation, a war in Ukraine, and troubles in China, the world’s second-largest economy.

“This is the most complex, disparate, and cross-cutting set of challenges that I can remember in the 40 years that I have been paying attention to such things,” said Lawrence Summers, former U.S Treasury secretary and former president of Harvard, in a recent talk.

Problems like these reach “crisis” proportions when their size and interconnectedness overwhelm people’s confidence that they can cope. Many of today’s problems look so intractable that they can feel “permanent.” Bank of America has a running tracker of the top worries on investment manager minds, and a review of the past decade’s top worries shows that several concerns, such as populist autocrats causing societal upheaval and inflation causing recessions, actually did happen. When bad things keep happening, it can raise people’s nervousness.

For the travel sector, permanxiety provides an opportunity for travel companies to help alleviate travelers’ concerns by finding subtle ways of recognizing this intense cultural moment globally. It would probably be a mistake for the travel industry to go too far and cast itself as a hero in the story by trying to rescue people from their permanxieties. Instead, there’s a modest, in-between option: Travel brands can move away from their traditional role of wholly repressing troubles to subtly