A Road Less Travelled By

Travel comes as part and parcel of the 21st century lifestyle. Be it for work for pleasure, people travel to-and-fro in the comforts of their plane seats without even thinking twice. All thanks to the convenience of booking tickets via mobile phones in a jiffy. You just have to pack a bag and hop onto the plane. The pilot does the rest ? dropping you off at your thousands-of-miles-away destination, safely. Covid-19 has, however, put a big question mark for all such travel plans. Conducting a poll on the same, we at Opinion Bureau, asked 2,720 people whether they had any travel plans before the restrictions were imposed due to coronavirus. Majority of the people (60.51%) say that they did, in fact, have travel plans before these restrictions while 32.32% of the respondents didn't have any plans. Whereas 7.17% of the respondent say that they might have had plans from before.

The Best-Laid Plans Go Astray

Covid-19 has brought with itself multitudes of changes. The biggest one being in the form of restrictions it has imposed on our mobility. So, to take count of how it affected the lives of people, we conducted a poll with 2,622 respondents. We asked them whether they had booked tickets in advance before the travel restrictions were imposed or not. 33.79% of the respondents replied in affirmative as they had booked tickets to confirm their travel status. 60.26% of the respondents didn't book any tickets but were definitely planning their travel. A small group of respondents, comprising of 5.95% of the people, said that they hadn't booked their tickets yet but had already applied for visas.

A Mayday for Refunds?

One of the most affected business during the pandemic air travel  is literally flying without any navigation support. The fear of the virus along with the restrictions imposed by the governments, has brought the travel business to a complete halt. These unprecedented effects have been a nightmare for them as well as the people who pre-booked their flights. To get a clearer picture of the situation, we asked 2,570 people whether they received a refund for their bookings or not. 40.70% of the respondents, or the lucky lot, were reimbursed in full while the not-so-lucky 46.70% didn't get any refund. 13.23% of the respondents, on the other hand, received a partial reimbursement for their booking amounts.