The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) has launched a new 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. The data dashboard, named Interactive COVID-19 Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard, was developed by WTTC with the support of McKinsey & Company.
This 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.
Gloria Guevara, WTTC President & CEO, said: “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 due to the pandemic. With one in four new jobs being generated by the Travel & Tourism sector in the last five years, easy access to data is more important than ever.”
Unveiled last Thursday, 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 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.
According to WTTC’s 2020 Economic Impact Report, in 2019, Travel & Tourism was responsible for one in 10 jobs (330 million total), making a 10.3% contribution to global GDP and generating one in four of all new jobs.
