What is the future of travel in a COVID-19 world?

Airport disinfection booths, smart helmets, wristbands and even selfie tracking.

This is the potential future of international travel as the world figures out how to live with COVID-19.

Asia is at the forefront of trialling new technology in the hopes it will enable the opening of borders.

READ MORE: Aussie pet owners charter $100k plane to get animals home from Canada

From tomorrow a two-way travel bubble will open up between Singapore and Hong Kong.

Travellers must provide a negative PCR test 72 hours prior to departure.

Hong Kong's Airport Authority has invested in "CleanTech" including autonomous cleaning robots, microbial coating surfaces and a full-body disinfection booth for all travellers.

Professor Peter Collignon from the ANU Medical School believes rapid testing could play a key role in opening up Australia's borders to low-risk countries like Singapore, Korea, Hong Kong and Japan.

"We can also test the sewerage potentially of long-haul flights, because about two-thirds of people with covid excrete it with their bowel," he told A Current Affair.

READ MORE: Qantas seeks new Asian routes amid potential new travel bubble

"Therefore if you test the sewage on a flight of and it's positive you know there were people on that plane that likely had COVID."

Professor Collignon also believes that enforced hotel quarantine for incoming travellers is costly and not necessary for low-risk countries.

"We do a test when people arrive to check that they haven't got it, and maybe even let them go into the community if their test is negative."

Some countries are implementing wrist or ankle bracelets to ensure incoming arrivals are quarantining at home.

Others are using text messages to track your geolocation.

Poland is making return residents respond to text messages with a selfie in their own home.

READ MORE: Exclusive: Aussie companies call for urgent re-start of cruise industry

Latika Bourke is a UK Correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, based in London.

An avid traveller, Ms Bourke took advantage of European travel corridors and visited Italy, Croatia and Thessaloniki in Greece within the last five months.

"There's normally millions of tourists (in Europe) there just in August alone. It was down around 70 per cent, which meant we got all the great restaurants, see all the great Game of Thrones sites without any other tourists there," Ms Bourke said. 

"All the waiters had time to serve you and talk to you. Travelling was absolutely fantastic."

However, the vacation window is now over for most of Europe. This week Germany, France, Ireland and the Netherlands have all gone back into lockdown as a second wave of the virus sweeps the continent.

"I think the idea was always a window where Europe was saying please come for a holiday, we really want to see you, we'll make it fun because we all know the winter is ahead," Ms Bourke said.

The United States is faring even worse.

Nine million COVID-19 infections so far, with almost half a million people contracting the virus in the last seven days.

Without a vaccine, travel to either the US or Europe remains an impossibility for 2021.

Simon Westaway, Executive Director of the Australian Tourism Industry Council, wants to see a two-way travel bubble open between Australia and New Zealand by Christmas.

"Asia really is our key inboard market. China obviously but also places such as Singapore and Korea," he said.

"It's really imperative now that we open up our country get all of our domestic borders reopen.

It'll be even more depressing once 2021 if we have a clean country without the virus, but we have no one travelling around," Mr Westaway said.

"We were an open economy pre the virus. We can't be scared about the virus anymore."