WTTC launches COVID-19 travel recovery dashboard
A new in-depth data dashboard highlighting the recovery of travel demand across flights and hotels, as well as revealing the shifting intentions of travellers through online travel searches, has been launched by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC).
The one-stop data shop or Interactive COVID-19 Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard was developed by WTTC, which represents the global Travel & Tourism private sector, with support from McKinsey & Company.
This unique 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 across the globe are eased. Free to all WTTC Members and non-members, the Dashboard presents two distinct views based on Google trends and searches, and bookings via WTTC’s research partners in the project.
Global experts in business intelligence, tourism and travel trends, ForwardKeys, provide the flight data, while premium data benchmarking, analytics and marketplace insights provider for global hospitality sectors, STR, shares hotel occupancy levels.
Gloria Guevara, WTTC President & CEO, said: “We have created a unique dashboard featuring qualitative and quantitative data to provide the insights which could be crucial to help the Travel & Tourism sector re-start and map out the path to its recovery. 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.”
“Data is essential for businesses, government and other organisations to make informed choices and drive the policy which will revive a sector that has suffered disproportionately due to the pandemic. With one in four jobs new jobs being generated by the Travel & Tourism sector in the last five years, it’s more important than ever that easy access to data on a regional and global level help inform the right choices at the right time,” she said.
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.
The Dashboard shows that while search for travel interest is still lower than last year, Europe is leading the recovery with search now just 20% down on last year. However, adventure is the fastest recovering search segment globally, at just 10% down on last year, versus 40% 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% above 2019 levels.