TOURISM IN TIMES OF WAR WHILE PEACE ARRIVES

March 24, 2026 Traveller Times

José Aleixandre Caballero :

It is obvious that tourism is the first industry to come to a standstill in the face of an evident situation of danger to one’s own life…

This is how fragile and volatile this business is, which affects a large part of the economy in most countries of the world.

If money is “cowardly”, tourism is “prudent”… and what usually happens is that while MICE tourism, cultural tourism, vacation tourism, etc. change their destination countries in these situations, in-person business meetings are paralyzed, cancelled or postponed.

These movements in tourist flows, forced by physical insecurity and personal instability suffered by countries involved in a war conflict, immediately create a serious effect of insecurity and economic instability, also negatively impacting the significant income generated by the tourism industry.

This is due to the paralysis created in the income generated by tourism in the receiving country, not only at the state level but also in the industries that depend directly or indirectly on the tourism business of the destination, whose effects can even lead to business closures and poverty for its inhabitants.

Choosing peace and dialogue seems to not satisfy “a” part of the world… that world that with “other principles” and its own laws are “masters of the street”, self-appointed judges of the universe… and that with their actions, they don’t need to dialogue… they don’t want to, nor do they know how… they can kill, take lives, lands, and properties, their strength beyond rational intelligence, makes clear their confusion of the concept of greatness and power with brute force and egocentrism, which leads them to their unreason… or other reasons… that although existing outside of dialogue… are based on inequality through material force to subdue with arms at the cost of human lives with a single “goal”… that goal that for many justifies the means… to obtain greater wealth and human vanities.

In the end, that is the only and sad reason or unreason to “move plundering the world” in order to strip the adversary of their lives, properties, goods, and wealth to “inflict” on them with their defeat a debt “full of hope” in the name of a peace paid with innocent human lives and always subject to economic debt.

However, Tourism, which is peace and human freedom, becomes in these cases the hope of a better future due to its appreciated contribution of wealth…

Tourism soon decides, due to its fortunately fragile memory, the moment of a longed-for return,… when peace and stability return, calm is created… the return to those destinations that satisfy their desires for a stay.

Those “prudent” travelers who never paralyzed their hopes… recover their expectations, returning to the destinations once they are calm…. destinations reborn that will regain life full of illusions, announcing to the world the benefits contained in their new products, full of activities and leisure, content for peace and hope.

Wars have that… they destroy and kill, so that a new and perhaps unnecessary procedure… marks the beginning of a cycle creating “new life” that mixes in memory with a part of “savvy humanity”.

The world will continue imperturbable with its “tempo”… as if nothing affected it, indifferent to the behaviors of the beings that inhabit it…. Beings that at the rhythm of stability become travelers who, as tourists, will travel the world as messengers of Peace.

March 2026