SINGAPORE, 24 November 2020: Tripadvisor and Phocuswright, a leading travel market research, released a comprehensive research paper at the weekend on the shifting trends of global travel demand and traveller behaviour.
The report, entitled ‘2020 – A Year in Travel: Charting the Travel Industry’s Path to Recovery’, analyses Tripadvisor’s first-party data on travel planning behaviours around the globe, as well as consumer sentiment across six major markets, to provide insights into global travel trends.
Report takeaways
After positive signs of recovery in domestic leisure travel over the summer, demand for accommodation is now falling back in a number of markets as infection rates rise.
Europe experienced the strongest leisure travel recovery during the summer, with the number of travellers researching domestic hotel stays reaching 2019 levels of demand for a sustained period in late July and August.
The recent re-introduction of lockdown restrictions in countries like France, Germany and the UK has seen demand for rooms drop.
Signs of recovery in Asia-Pacific were less obvious across the region as a whole between June and October, though some markets – such as Singapore – saw a surge in demand for domestic stays.
Two-thirds of consumers surveyed (65%) say the ability to avoid crowded places when travelling is now a more important factor in their choice of the destination than it was pre-pandemic, and more than half (52%) say they are more likely to take an outdoor/nature trip than they were before the pandemic.
Between May and September, outdoor activities, nature and parks accounted for 34% of all attraction page views on Tripadvisor, up from 25% in 2019.
Looking at year-on-year data over the October period, ski and seaside resorts, as well as other rural destinations, dominated the list of fastest recovering destinations in Europe for domestic accommodation searches on Tripadvisor, with Zermatt in Switzerland and Adler in Russia topping the list based on year-on-year demand.
Nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents are still thinking about where they want to travel next and last-minute trips are in, but so is meticulous planning.
The advanced planning window (the number of days between when a trip is planned and when the trip takes place) has shortened as travellers are eager for last-minute, local getaways.
In October 2020, nearly two-thirds (62%) of travellers looking for accommodation on Tripadvisor were planning to check-in less than 30 days out, compared to just over half (51%) of travellers during the same period in 2019.
People’s desire to plan travel more diligently is now higher than pre-pandemic times. More than two-thirds (69%) of respondents agreed they were going to research their next trip more than they did in the past.
The full report can be read, for free, here: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Covid19WhitepaperNovember202
