Nuremberg, 31st of August 2021 - The booking month of July 2021 is no longer keeping pace with the exceptionally good previous month of June: New bookings for holidays booked online or in travel agencies are at a level of around 70 percent of what was generated in the pre-Corona period of July 2019. At the same time, the current volume is characterised by extremely short-term booking behaviour. Cumulatively, the 2021 summer season is 62 percent behind summer 2019 at the current booking level as of the end of July - three percentage points less than the previous month. However, last year's summer season 2020 has already been very clearly topped at this point in time by a “+127” percent.
57 percent of the monthly turnover in July 2021 was due to short-term holiday bookings with departure in July/August. This means that the last-minute volume is currently higher than ever before. This compares to 48 percent in July 2020 and 33 percent in July 2019 before Corona. The situation regarding which holiday regions can be travelled to and with which restrictions and requirements remains highly dynamic and changes from week to week. This is likely to promote the short-term booking behaviour of those willing to travel - and in turn hinder longer-term holiday planning. Accordingly, advance bookings for the upcoming winter season are low. In July 2021, they will account for only 12 percent of booking revenues. Without pandemic-related restrictions, the share would be about three times as high. Cumulatively, i.e. booked up to and including July, the coming winter season 2021/22 shows a 49 percent drop in turnover compared to the largely intact 2019/20 season. A comparison with the previous year's 2020/21 season is not meaningful, as almost all winter trips in the travel half-year from November 2020 to April 2021 were ultimately cancelled.
In line with the focus on summer and autumn holidays, Greece and Turkey in particular were heavily booked by tour operators in July 2021. Spain with the Balearic and Canary Islands as well as Portugal, however, suffered massive losses: compared to the previous month, new bookings and trip cancellations added up to sales declines of 70 per cent or more. Italy and earthbound destinations as a whole, however, continued to be in good demand.
Legend:
The chart shows the cumulative travel revenues generated by the end of July 2021 for the 2021 summer season and the coming 2021/22 winter season in comparison with the previous year and the year before. Both holiday travel bookings in stationary travel agencies and online on the travel portals of tour operators and online travel agencies (OTAs) with a focus on package tours are included. The chart on the left shows the percentage of turnover in the booking month of July accounted for by the individual travel months and seasons.
Note: Since the booking month of March 2021, Travel Data + Analytics has also used 2019 as a pre-Corona comparison, as bookings collapsed from mid-February 2020 and hardly any travel took place during the lockdowns.
About TDA Travel Intelligence
Travel Data + Analytics (TDA) took over in spring 2019 the travel sales panel run by the Nuremberg market research company GfK since 2004. After the GfK data had been migrated to a new IT landscape, Travel Intelligence was set up as an independent solution with a self-learning database and associated analysis tool. The basis remains the booking data from stationary travel agencies and online portals that sell tour operator products. The requirements of tourism companies on a modern control instrument and evolving, increasingly dynamic questions can thus be mapped reliably and promptly, without giving up the core of a market-representative method that is consistently comparable over time. TDA = Current booking situation + individual product performance + new market opportunities.
Further information: Alexandra Weigand, alexandra.weigand@traveldataanalytics.de, phone: +49 (0)911 951 510 03