Gobalakrishnan Venkataraman

Work during the Pandemic In Nov 2019, I was working in a DMC for Thailand and at first, we were hearing of a small biological threat coming from China and it was affecting some places in Thailand. However, we were not alerted to the seriousness of the virus and here I’m going to explain the process of working through a normal state to the epidemic and to a full-blown pandemic. This was really an exhilarating experience as I was in the field of hospitality. During the month of Dec 2019, it was getting a little bit more intense. We were starting to feel a little pressure from the travelling since we knew the Chinese New Year was around the corner. This irrational fear was later turned into a grim reality as we know the peak season was considered to be during the New Year. Jan 2020, the dreaded year has been born and the Chinese New The year was underway and the number of travellers was exceedingly higher than last year. This was really nerve-wracking since we had a high volume of people travelling from India. WHO was acting on this at a snail’s pace and once they reacted aptly it was too little too late. The normal stage of the virus turned into an epidemic and even though India was not affected we were starting to send people with hand sanitisers, masks and gave them an orientation about being safe. Feb 2020, Cases were going high, it was still not classified as pandemic and people were cancelling their trips and we were slowly facing cases and problems in Thailand as well. We were facing issues with our guides since they were getting covid positive. Mar – June 2020, we were slowly facing problems due to the virus being classified as a pandemic and travel to other countries was being cancelled and the company was being closed down. We were working on tourism inside India however we were facing issue due to the orientations we had to give to all the customers. However, due to the growing of cases and loss of life inside the company for working members, we had to close the company.