Travelers like Stephanie Wolkin are looking for a safe bet for their upcoming trips. But how do you define safe at a time like this?

Safe for Wolkin means she can see her 97-year-old mother in New Jersey without infecting her with the deadly COVID-19 virus. Safe means she can find a way to make her annual trip to France this year, to make up for the one canceled last summer.

“I don’t think I will be comfortable traveling until the vaccines are more widely available and there is some way to verify that those boarding a plane have been vaccinated,” says Wolkin, a retired educational worker from White Bear Lake, Minnesota. “I also would want the obligatory wearing of masks by all passengers to be strictly enforced.” 

Other travelers echo her concerns. One-third of corporate travelers said they wanted their employers to adopt travel policies that define cleanliness, social distancing, and procedures to prevent virus transmission, according to an internal customer survey by TripActions, an expense management system provider. 

“It’s their top requested change to their corporate travel policy,” says TripActions spokeswoman Kelly Soderlund.

But how do you define safe, and how do you get it? It turns out these are easy questions with surprisingly difficult answers. Safety increasingly means just one thing: avoiding the coronavirus. Getting that security may be an elusive goal.

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