IPK: Global Outbound Trips for 2019 Slightly Down

IPK International, a leading tourism consultancy, anticipates global outbound trips to increase by 4 percent in 2019.

“With predictions of the global economic growth slowing down in 2019, also the forecast for international travel for this year is slightly below the performance of 2018,” IPK International CEO Rolf Freitag said on Wednesday while presenting IPK’s World travel Monitor at the ITB Berlin exhibition.

In 2018, the number of outbound trips increased by 5.5 percent, resulting in 1.4 billion international trips. According to IPK, Asia and Europe were the global winners by receiving 6 percent more international trips each.

For this year, Asia-Pacific remains leading with an expected plus of 6 percent. Growth in the Americas is forecasted to reach 5 percent, while Europe with 3 percent is showing a weakening trend compared to 2018.

Increasing effect of overtourism

According to IPK’s World Travel Monitor, overtourism could become another growing problem for the tourism industry, with more and more international travelers feeling the effect of overcrowded destinations.

“While residents in affected destinations have been protesting for years, also travelers are feeling more and more impaired by the onslaught of tourist in particularly sought-after cities,” Freitag said.

IPK’s latest survey results show that more than every tenth international traveler was negatively affected by overtourism, an increase of 30 percent over the last 12 months. Cities strongly affected by overtourism in 2018 were Beijing, Mexico City, Venice and Amsterdam, but also Istanbul and Florence.

Moreover, according to the statistics, in 2018 holidays once again outperformed business trips, due to the continuous downward path of traditional business trips, while MICE trips continued on a growth path.

The survey showed that international travelers stayed slightly longer and also spent more when abroad, leading the turnover of international trips overall to increase by 8 percent.

IPK’s World travel Monitor is an annual survey analyzing the outbound travel behavior in more than 60 countries worldwide, covering over 90 per cent of the global outbound demand.