“Citizens are tired of corona”
Summer bookings are heading towards pre-crisis levels
By Christina Lohner
2/15/2022, 7:56 p.m
If you finally want to travel again this summer, you should think about booking quickly. After two years of the pandemic, the travel industry is expecting bookings to return to the level of 2019. More Germans are also venturing abroad again.
The desire to travel has often fallen victim to the Corona crisis in the past two years, but now significantly more Germans are planning vacation trips again. The industry is hoping for a return to pre-crisis levels, at least for the summer. “Something is happening with the incoming bookings,” reports the spokeswoman for the German Travel Association (DRV), Kerstin Heinen, ntv.de. “We are not yet at the level of 2019, but in the summer we can approach the pre-crisis level.” At the same time, more holidaymakers want to go abroad again.
DER Touristik, for example, assumes a strong summer season in view of “very good demand”, as spokeswoman Angela de Sando tells ntv.de. “We expect that normal bookings will return from the middle of the year and that demand can reach the pre-pandemic level.”
Tui also expects summer business like before Corona. Since the bookings are increasing significantly again, the largest tourism group has already had its planes take off for the spring season on Mallorca. In the course of the season, all hotels on the Balearic Islands should be available again for the first time since the pandemic began. Lufthansa is also recording high booking numbers for the coming holiday season. On individual routes in Europe, bookings are already three times as high as before the pandemic.
Prices sometimes even lower than before Corona
Germans prefer to vacation in their home country, which according to the DRV was intensified in the Corona crisis. The proportion of all trips of five days or more increased from around a quarter to around half in the past year. But the new bookings for flight packages are now encouraging the industry that vacationers are traveling abroad more again, even if the pre-crisis level has probably not yet been reached here.
At the moment more customers are booking trips to the popular countries of Spain, Greece and Turkey. “Portugal and Croatia will probably come back,” predicts Heinen. At DER, customers most frequently book for the summer for Turkey, Greece, Mallorca, Egypt and Italy. In terms of long-haul destinations, the USA, the Caribbean and the Indian Ocean showed pleasingly high demand.
According to DRV, the prices for vacation trips are stable, but customers spend more money on their vacation. “The willingness to spend is increasing,” says Heinen. For example, some book a fancier hotel, while others stay longer. DER even reports cheaper prices than before the pandemic. “In the destinations of Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, Egypt, the Balearic Islands, Cuba and the Dominican Republic, they are around 20 to 25 percent cheaper in the summer of 2022 than in the pre-Corona summer of 2019,” the spokeswoman calculates. “However, we assume that prices will return to pre-pandemic levels once supply and demand have settled down to normal levels.”
Corona does not play a major role when it comes to travel destinations
The year as a whole will still not come close to 2019 for the industry, as the DRV clarifies. Because for the current winter, the bookings were still sluggish. As a rule, more long-distance trips are booked during the cold season, but Germans are still reluctant when it comes to flying into warm weather. Even if numerous countries are opening their borders to tourists again these days, such as Vietnam on Tuesday. For the year as a whole, the industry hopes to return to the pre-crisis level in 2023, or by 2024 at the latest.
The classic January peak in bookings is already back, as the analysis company TDA has determined, although not yet at the pre-corona level. Around the turn of the year, 57 percent of Germans said they would be going on vacation this year. This was the result of a recently published GFK survey commissioned by British American Tobacco’s Hamburg Foundation for Future Studies. “Citizens are tired of the corona virus and no longer want to be confronted with the pandemic around the clock,” says the scientific director of the foundation, Ulrich Reinhardt. According to the survey, around one in five is still undecided, and just as many are not planning a holiday trip this year.
Just over a quarter stated that Corona influences the travel destination, for example low incidences or when deciding between home and abroad. The worries that the trip would have to be canceled at short notice and that this would result in costs and having to go into quarantine drove more respondents at 24 percent each than the fear of getting infected on vacation (19 percent) or bringing the virus home with them (17 Percent). At 59 percent, overly strict corona rules on site also feared significantly more than overly loose conditions. Reinhardt: “People long for sun, beach and sea, want to be on the road again and leave as much uncertainty as possible at home.”