don ’ t think anyone , even the late , great Nostradamus , would have predicted a year ago that 12 months hence we ’ d be marking another Christmas amid uncertainty , another Shakespearean ‘ Winter of discontent ’.

By Christmas of 2020 , most of us were done with lockdowns but drew hope from the signs that , besides the baby Jesus and Santa Claus , a vaccine was also imminent , leading us inexorably along the road to salvation and redemption . Now we ’ re wondering whether , in fact , we should have put more trust in the baby Jesus as the vaccine is proving less bullet proof than the science initially foretold .

Sluggish uptake of the vaccine in some countries ( you know who you are !) along with a unwelcome procession of non-consecutive Greek letters signifying further variants of the original virus , sucked out all the positive energy we felt at IMEX in Las Vegas leaving us disappointed , despondent and dispirited by the time we met again in Barcelona for IBTM World – just over two weeks later . Yes , of course , we made the best of it , as we always do , but behind the watery smiles and the gallows humour , we felt bad .

A week on from Barcelona and , do you know , I think the mood changed again . Today , I ’ ll have a socially distanced drink with a great buddy from Dallas , in town on a site inspection for a programme in late

2022 . I chatted with a local DMC earlier who told me that enquiries are way up , and that 2022 and 2023 are looking better than 2019 ( their best year ever ).

I ’ m also involved in daily planning calls for SITE Global Conference , taking place in late January in Dublin and while there are additional restrictions in place at the moment in Ireland ’ s capital , the organising goes on apace , full of Plan B scenarios . In other words , we ’ re getting on with it .

And that ’ s the point , isn ’ t it ? We ’ re living with Covid , working with it , working around it , working through it . Clients need to meet , to deliver their incentive travel programmes , to stage their conferences , to run their events . After almost two years of Covid , we ’ ve developed protocols that previously didn ’ t exist and we now know how to deliver – it might be entirely digital , it might be reduced numbers , it might be hybrid , but we have solutions and our industry is actively implementing these , tweaking them , refining them , but making it happen for our clients .

Left : Padraic

Gilligan

During the pandemic , along with everyone else in the world , I developed an antipathy for the word ‘ pivot ’. More recently , I ’ ve been getting the same negative feelings towards the word ‘ resilience ’. I ’ m finding more incidence of its misuse than cases of the virus ( and those daily cases are in their thousands where I live !) and everyone and his maiden aunt is talking about “ the resilience of the human spirit ”. But not me .

I ’ m simply going to call out what a remarkable species we are . We ’ ve realised now that it ’ s time to get on with it , and that ’ s precisely what we ’ re doing . We ’ re not waiting for Covid to go away because it might be with us for a very long time . We don ’ t have that long to wait . We have meetings to organise , incentives to arrange , conferences to stage , events to manage .

Let ’ s just do it !