The ‘one year ago’ moments have started to creep through our social media feeds, reminding us of those last moments with friends, family and for me, my team as our departure from normality accelerated more quickly than any of us would have anticipated.

A year ago, the Scottish Tourism Alliance (STA) had just delivered our annual conference at the SEC; Scotland’s tourism strategy Outlook 2030 was launched by the First Minister and our 500 delegates went back to their businesses bolstered by the vision of the strategy, that Scotland will be the world leader in 21st century tourism.

Despite everything we have gone through over the last year, I know this vision remains strong.

We have always been resilient, determined and ambitious – our tourism product is one of the best in the world, however we are at a critical point where we’ll either follow a path to recovery that will set us on our way to delivering this vision or we will be left behind.

The pent-up demand for domestic tourism is well documented; we rely on 70 per cent of our market coming from within the UK.

This isn’t and never will be enough to achieve sustainable growth for the sector, for that we are dependent on our international market returning soon. If it doesn’t return until later in the year, there will be businesses which will not have traded viably for 30 months.

This week, many of our businesses are attending one of the world’s largest international travel trade shows, ITB Berlin, promoting and selling Scotland to the world and contracting business for next two years.

Signs of hope are on the horizon with the delivery of the vaccine and sounds of optimism are coming from governments around the potential easing of restrictions, however focus must now be given to driving forward a robust, European co-ordinated, risk-based approach in relation to the return of international travel with firm alignment with the rest of the UK

To recover, we need to be at the starting line now, ahead of other destinations. We need to be in a position where we can be progressive in our links with our international markets, do as much as we can to ensure that those who have existing bookings can come here and for our businesses to be able to take future bookings with confidence.

We’re not in a position to do that at the moment but we are starting to see marketing campaigns from other global destinations who will happily take a share of Scotland’s markets.

We know that potential visitors are becoming increasingly frustrated that they have had the vaccine, can prove evidence of a negative test but cannot plan to travel to Scotland – can we afford to wait much longer to market our tourism product, knowing that decisions are being made on travel now?

The development of an EU framework for travel related testing and vaccine verification which is aligned with international standards must be developed as a priority; this is part of the Tourism Task Force recommendations to governments and one which is absolutely essential for growing both consumer and business confidence.

Tourism is an export business; if we can’t get the international market moving soon, airlines will withdraw their aircraft and change their routes, consumers will lose confidence and our ability to compete as a destination and be a world leader in 21st century tourism will be significantly compromised at best and highly unlikely at worst.

Having a clear plan for reopening including international travel, is the most important message our tourism industry could receive from government ‘one year on’.

Marc Crothall is the chief executive of the Scottish Tourism Alliance