Around six weeks ago and fresh off the back of PM Scott Morrison’s Australia’s four-phase pathway out of the pandemic announcement, The Flight Centre Travel Group (FCTG) upped the ante by placing a print advertisement in The Australian to present its own ‘roadmap to open up the world’ with some timelines we could all get excited about.
The print advertisement was placed at the company’s expense in ScoMo’s favourite read, The Weekend Australian, to dial up the narrative on the great border debate by publicly pushing a more determined agenda to resume domestic and international travel.
The ad was also listed on behalf of travel, tourism, airline, airport, events, farming, mining, and education industries.
To grab the attention of our nation’s leaders, the print advertisement led with the call, ‘To the Prime Minister and Premiers, here’s what Australia’s road to freedom could look like. What is your road to Australia’s freedom?’
At the time, Sydney and its surroundings had just gone into lockdown (the only state at the time), the trans-Tasman bubble was bursting and there was no other ‘vaccination for travel’ campaign pushes out there.
As such, it was deemed a bold and ‘provocative’ move as they say in military terms.
Though I’d prefer to call it ‘ballsy’, and at the time we applauded it here at Karryon wholeheartedly.
This was why we ran the story below which consequently went crazy traffic-wise and got shared out thousands of times across social media.
Telling much? Turns out we were all waiting for someone – anyone! to do something to change the stakes and get in the ear of the powers who hopefully might listen to our desperate travel industry and JobKeeper-less plight.
It’s now mid-August, and we’ve since seen Tourism Australia launch their recent ‘Our Best Shot For Travel’ campaign alongside ‘Give Travel A Shot’ and ‘Be Travel Ready’ to help promote the vaccination push to reach the 80% target set by the federal government.
All fantastic initiatives to spread the word and help us get both here and there.
And while we still don’t have a firm timeline from the federal government as to when exactly we can claim ‘freedom’, we are, at least now travelling in the right direction and far quicker than before with our national vaccination rate currently sitting today at 48 per cent having had one shot and 26.2 per cent fully vaccinated. (You can get the latest data here)
As it turns out, six weeks on, it appears that FCTG’s roadmap was a good start at least in terms of the route towards an early end 2022 destination we are now travelling towards anyway.
‘Our path to freedom’ explained
- To sum up FCTG’s proposed pathway (at the time), By the end of July, 50% of Australian adults would be jabbed with one or two shots, rising from the 17.7% at the time who have been vaccinated with one shot or 7.35% who were fully vaccinated. Clearly still some work to to do here, but the VR rate is now moving.
- Moving through August to December 2021 on FCTG’s road to freedom, 70% of adults would be jabbed with one or two shots by around September.
- 5-days home quarantine would also be introduced around September, reducing to 3-days in November with a negative PCR test for travellers to medium to low-risk countries and hotel quarantine only needed if travellers were arriving from a high-risk country.
- By the end of 2021, it would be hoped that 100% of adult Australians would be vaccinated with one or two shots and the eventual goal of ‘Freedom at last,’ and international departures galore achieved in January 2022 when COVID-19 becomes endemic.
- Meaning also, that there would be no quarantine for all fully vaccinated arrivals.
- FCTG also suggest that full vaccination would be compulsory for international air travel.
Get the campaign toolkit and find out more!
Flight Centre Travel Group has now launched a website that houses a digital toolkit full of social media assets for everyone to use including their ‘roadmap to open up the world’ as shown above.
It’s important to note that FCTG has designed this for everyone to use.
There are no FCTG logos on anything, and the objective is a universal one for the benefit of both travellers and the travel industry at large.
Speaking about the initiative, Darren Wright, Global CMO for FCTG Leisure said, “It’s very much about the people of the industry and their stories. Only solid vaccination levels are going to bring about open borders and we don’t want to see further lockdowns, so we support all the government’s initiatives to get Australia vaccinated, we need everyone on board this pathway to freedom to save many industries directly and indirectly affected.”
It’s simple. We can only win together on this.
Will you join us on the path to freedom?
Find out more: www.ourpathtofreedom.com.au