Nuremberg, March 2nd, 2022 – Holiday travel bookings in the German market have been increasing rapidly from week to week since the beginning of the year. However, the booking volume just exceeds the pre-crisis level of 2019 in the second week of February (week 6). In January, it still lags behind overall. Nevertheless, the coming summer season 2022 can improve by two percentage points compared to the previous month - to a cumulative deficit of 48 percent. The 2021/22 winter season, which lasted until the end of April, remained at a minus of 46 percent compared to the 2018/19 winter season. It is not until the beginning of February that travel bookings for the spring and Easter holidays start to pick up.
According to plans by the federal government, the Corona travel rules are to be relaxed from the beginning of March and the travel warnings are being lifted for more and more holiday countries. This is clearly noticeable as a positive spirit of optimism in the holiday travel business. Travel bookings in travel agencies and on the online portals of tour operators and OTAs increased significantly in January, especially for the upcoming summer season. Two thirds of the monthly turnover was due to the travel period from May to October 2022, the largest part of which is attributable to the Whitsun holidays in June and the long summer holidays in July/August.
For the upcoming summer vacation, the classic travel destinations in the Mediterranean are in the center of interest: Spain with the Balearic and Canary Islands, Greece and Turkey. Taken together, these three particularly popular travel destinations account for more than half of January sales, followed by Egypt.
As long as the signs continue to point to an easing of the corona situation, the coming summer season has a real chance of further reducing its deficit in the coming months. It will be more difficult for the 2021/2022 winter season, which runs until the end of April, and which has a cumulative minus of 46 percent at the current booking level. In the booking month of January 2022, just under a third of holiday travel sales were attributable to the remaining winter travel months. With a turnover share of 13 percent for departures in January/February, the short-term business is still relatively high. The share of sales for spring and Easter holidays increases from 18 percent in January to up to 25 percent in mid-February. The demand, especially for the Easter holidays, is now increasing sharply.
Legend:
The chart shows the cumulative travel sales generated up to the end of Januar 2022 for the 2022 summer season and the 2021/22 winter season in comparison to previous years (2019 and 2021 summer and 2018/19 and 2020/21 winter seasons). For the travel seasons, TDA compares the booking status adjusted for trips that were canceled in previous years due to corona. Both holiday travel bookings in stationary travel agencies and online on the travel portals of the tour operators and online travel agencies (OTAs) with a focus on package tours are included. The chart on the left shows the percentage of sales in the booking month December that is attributable to the individual travel months or seasons.
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