Nuremberg, December 29, 2023 - During booking month of November 2023, Germans booked holiday trips organised as packages or modules for about 1.8 billion euros. More than half of the monthly sales is already spent to the next year's summer holidays. The summer season booking habits are back with a considerable early booking volume. Over the past few weeks, the volume of new bookings in travel sales has returned to Pre Covid levels and remains significantly higher than in the previous year. Last year, holiday bookings only picked up towards the end of the year. This resulted in high double-digit growth rates compared to the previous year.
Compared to the same month last year, travel sales in Germany were up 23 per cent in November 2023. Early bookers are back in their old strength. Holiday bookings for the upcoming 2024 summer season already account for 54 per cent of monthly sales. Turkey is in particularly high demand - with a cumulative increase in sales of over 90 per cent compared to summer 2019. Booking sales for Turkey even exceed those for Spain as a whole at this early stage. No other holiday destination is more popular with early bookers. The growth drivers for the 2024 summer season include the Eastern Mediterranean region (+30 per cent) and long-haul travel (+10 per cent). Overall, the 2024 summer season shows a bookings as at the end of November, the 2024 summer season shows an increase in sales of 3 per cent compared to the 2019 summer season. Compared to the pre-corona level, the number of people booked is 18% lower - compared to the previous year, the number of tour operator trips has risen significantly by 54%. Unlike last year, inflation and impending price increases for petrol and heating seem to be less of an obstacle to holiday planning for German citizens at the moment. The high cumulative increase in sales of currently 59 per cent compared to the previous year will dwindle in the coming weeks and months. Last year's summer was heavily booked from the end of the year.
The current winter season 2023/24 shows a growth in sales of 12 per cent compared to the pre-corona level at the current booking level, improving by a full 5 percentage points compared to the previous month. Compared to the previous year, sales are still up 37 per cent. Winter holidays accounted for 42% of sales in the past booking month of November - 8 percentage points less than in the previous year. The Canary Islands are the undisputed leader among German holidaymakers' destinations in the winter months. Demand also remains strong for cruises, which make an above-average contribution to winter growth.
Legend:
The chart shows the cumulative travel sales generated up to the end of November 2023 for the ongoing summer season 2023 in comparison to previous years (summer season 2019). For the travel seasons, TDA compares the booking status adjusted for trips that were cancelled in previous years due to corona. Both holiday travel bookings in high street 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 September that belongs 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