WTTC Launches Interactive Covid-19 Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard

The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) on Thursday launched a new in-depth data dashboard highlighting the recovery of travel demand across flights and hotels. in the post-coronavirus era.

“Our dashboard will enable decision makers to track the impact of public policies by monitoring the positive and negative fluctuations of flight and hotel bookings and also online travel searches, as well as consumer confidence,” WTTC President & CEO Gloria Guevara said.

The Covid-19 travel demand recovery dashboard also reveals the shifting intentions of travellers through online travel searches.

According to the WTTC, the tool provides users with easy access to qualitative and quantitative travel data at the global and regional level as well as for 33 major countries around the world, by revealing travel demand since the beginning of the year and is updated on a fortnightly basis.

The dashboard offers a useful way to navigate through a vast array of data as travel demand around the world changes, in response to the gradual reopening of country’s borders as travel restrictions are across the globe are eased.

Insights through two main avenues

Free to all WTTC Members and non-members, the new data dashboard offers insights through two main avenues.

The first is via Google Trends, where all the data sourced has been organised into easy-to-understand holiday or trip segments, Adventure, Culture, Urban, Family, Sun & Beach and Travel Services.

Each segmentation has been devised using a set of 20 keywords, covering popular activities, sites and destinations. The segments provide insights at both the regional level and for key Travel & Tourism countries, such as the UK, the US, France and Brazil.

The second comes via regional insights through bi-monthly updates on movements and bookings, with flight information from WTTC’s research partner ForwardKeys, hotel occupancy and average daily room rates from STR and the Google Mobility Index, which shows local recreational activity.

In addition, Global Rescue, the Travel & Tourism global leader and pioneer in medical, security, travel risk and crisis management, provides data showing how ‘open’ each country or key market is, in the context of travel restrictions imposed to combat coronavirus.

Europe leading travel demand recovery

According to the dashboard’s latest data, while search for travel interest is still lower than last year, Europe is leading the recovery with search now just 20 percent down on last year.

The data shows that adventure is the fastest recovering search segment globally, at just 10 percent down on last year, versus 40 percent for other segments such as urban, sun and beach, family, culture etc.

In a number of countries such as France and Germany, adventure travel searches are 50-70 percent above 2019 levels.

The Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard can be found here.