Booking Holdings CEO supports vaccine passports as the travel industry plans revival

Vaccine passports are slowly becoming wide adopted and useful as most of the citizens are getting vaccinated to combat the COVID-19. While earlier, the airline industry only required ID verification and passports for travel, a new "Vaccine Report" is also being made compulsory. This is giving a sense of relief and hassle-free travel for people who are already vaccinated. This vaccine report can be helpful for other public places like gyms, restaurants, party halls, events, etc. Overall, the travel industry sees this as a hope to slow down the spread of the virus as well as revive the business lost last year.

Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel says, "Adopting vaccine passport systems could be a way to resume travel safely, especially as consumers look to travel abroad.I see very little downsides. I see significant upsides, and it's not like we haven't had this before. I don't see a problem with this in the least. This is a way to help bring back an industry that has been so devastated — in a safe way."

Currently,Booking Holdings owns several businesses like Booking.com, Kayak, Priceline, Agoda, Rentalcars, and OpenTable, all of which rely on travel and tourism for revenue.The company is going through a challenging phase as the whole travel and tourism business was down for almost the whole year. But Fogelis now optimistic about the vaccine passport program, which could be made compulsory for all travelers across the world, or atleast a few countries initially.

"When you take your passport around the world, no matter what country you go to, they take your passport and they put it through a thing, and it works, and the reason it works is because all the governments came up with a standard. And it'd be wonderful if they would do that with a whole health passport too," Fogel said.