In July 2020, I was asked to speak at a Stanford alumni event where I sat on a panel of experts to talk about our predictions for the future and what awaited after the pandemic. I was the travel expert, and in my company was a real estate agent, an employment attorney, and a medical doctor. While the other panelists shared some pearls of predictions for their respective industries, I felt like the messenger of doom. I was hesitant to give any specific date forecasts on when travel would “return to normal”, and felt awful when one attendee asked me if she thought she would be able to go on a cruise that Christmas. I knew that December 2020 was definitely too soon for a cruise to be considered safe, and at the rate we were going as a society, I wasn’t sure if she’d be safe going on a cruise in December 2021 either. 

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