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Winter bookings on the rise: summer on the brink!
Analysis of current booking trends in the travel industry: balancing declines and seasonal increases for 2023.
Winter bookings on the rise: summer on the brink!
In April 2023, the tour operator market recorded a 12% decline in bookings compared to the same month last year. While summer business showed a negative trend with a minus of 17%, winter ended with a plus of 8%. Loud Travel before9 The 2023 winter season even achieved an increase in sales of 8%. A positive aspect was the increase in last minute bookings for the Easter holidays, which rose by 16% in April, improving the figure by 1 percentage point on the previous month.
Stationary sales played a significant role and accounted for two-thirds of winter vacationers with a 7% increase in sales. Online sales also grew by 8%. The growth in advice-intensive products was particularly notable: long-distance travel recorded an increase of 7%, while cruises even increased by 12%.
Fluctuations in summer business
However, the strong early bird numbers for the summer season, which were registered until the end of April, have almost completely disappeared. A sales increase of 25% in November and 18% at the end of 2022.
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Bookings for summer vacations will amount to over 10 billion euros by the end of April 2023. The level of bookings compared to the summer of the previous year is 68% (previous month: 61%) and 69% of sales in April were in the summer season, which is 4 percentage points less than in the previous year. There is also a sharp decline in early booking decisions; only 24% of travel expenditure relates to early bookings for winter or summer holidays in the coming year.
Current challenges in US business
A look at the US business also shows interesting developments. Loud Travel Inside IPW, a leading trade fair for inbound travel to the USA, took place in Los Angeles at the beginning of May 2024. Around 5,700 delegates and partners took part, including 24 travel professionals from Switzerland. In 2023, the US saw a 28% increase in visitor numbers to nearly 67 million guests.
Forecasts suggest nearly 78 million U.S. travelers are expected by the end of 2024 and international traveler spending could likely increase 74% by 2027. In order to determine the current situation in the USA business, TRAVEL INSIDE conducted an online survey among Swiss travel professionals.
Survey results and price developments
The results of this survey show that 38% of travel professionals are seeing better bookings for US travel than 2023, while 24% report equally good bookings and 38% report worse bookings. Regarding the availability of tourism products, 57% of respondents rate the availability as good (45%) or very good (12%), while 29% report bottlenecks and 14% perceive availability as very poor, which requires adjustments to customer requirements.
Another important topic is the prices for trips to the USA. 72% of survey participants say that trips to the USA are more expensive than last year, while 21% consider the prices to be the same and 7% find them cheaper. When it comes to rental car and motor home prices in particular, 37% report higher prices compared to 2023, 45% see the prices as the same and 18% perceive them as cheaper.