Nuremberg, April 30, 2024 – Germans are in the mood to travel. Many have booked their holiday trips early again this year. The volume of bookings remains at a good level compared to the previous year, although the previous year started quite late in the booking season and the volume was therefore disproportionately high in February and March 2023. The shortfall in bookings compared to the pre-coronavirus level is also gradually decreasing for tour operator tours. In terms of sales, the current seasonal balances show good double-digit growth rates: both compared to the previous year - continuing to decline as expected - and compared to the pre-corona level - already increasing due to price factors.
One booking and travel month before the end of the 2023/24 winter season, sales were up 21% on the previous year and 16% on the pre-crisis winter of 2018/19. After the last summer season in 2023, a winter season has now also returned to a positive final result in terms of sales for the first time since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. The shortfall in bookings has decreased by around two percentage points from month to month - currently a minus of 8 per cent remains.
With 68 per cent of monthly sales, summer holidays were the most popular in the booking month of March 2024. Turkey and Spain are currently in a neck-and-neck race for first place among summer destinations, followed by Greece. With above-average growth compared to the previous year, Portugal and the Spanish mainland (both +22%) as well as the United Arab Emirates (+25%) are enjoying increasing popularity among German holidaymakers alongside Turkey (+45%). Cruises also stand out with a cumulative summer increase of 29 per cent compared to the current booking level and the previous year.
So far, Germans have spent almost 8.8 billion euros on their summer holidays this year. This represents a 63 per cent increase on last year's high-turnover season. The cumulative increase in turnover is currently 21 per cent with a 16 per cent increase in the number of people booked. Compared to the 2019 summer season, which was not affected by the crisis, the shortfall in bookings is still 14 per cent. Measured against the total number of German citizens who went on holiday with a tour operator in summer 2019, only 46% have currently been reached.
Legend:
The chart shows the cumulative travel sales generated up to the end of March 2024 for the current winter season 2023/24 and the upcoming summer season 2024 in comparison to the previous seasons and the pre-corona level (summer 2019, winter 2018/19). TDA's analyses include both holiday bookings in traditional travel agencies and online on the travel portals of tour operators and online travel agencies (OTAs) with a focus on package holidays. The chart on the left shows the percentage of sales in the booking month of March accounted for by the individual travel months and 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