RateGain Travel Technologies, a global SaaS provider for travel and hospitality, today shared insights on the state of the travel and hospitality industry, as well as the impact of travel demand in India’s two major cities Delhi and Mumbai as international travel resumes on March 27. As per RateGain’s analysis, except Hong Kong, China and Russia, all other major countries that contribute to tourism are showing higher bookings as compared to January 2022 when the world had briefly dealt with the Omicron wave. It is expected that the news of Hong Kong opening its border for nine countries will positively impact recovery in the key Asian destination for business. RateGain’s earlier analysis had suggested that the Omicron wave only impacted travel for two weeks after which bookings started recovering – suggesting that with each subsequent wave the impact on travel continues to reduce and the time for which travel bookings decline is becoming much shorter.
Europe’s travel resurgence
RateGain analyzed bookings over the last three months as well as compared bookings for the month of February to the previous year to understand if the industry is on track for recovery and a healthy 2022. When compared to 2021, European countries of France, Italy, Spain, and Japan have shown the biggest improvement with almost 5X higher bookings as compared to the same period last year. They are followed by Germany, UK that are witnessing 110-150% increase in bookings. India, Mexico, US, UAE are showing double digit growth as well as compared to last year. It should be noted that all four countries had already recovered to 70-80% of pre-pandemic levels in February of 2021 because of which the YoY growth seems lower.
Omicron and summer travel plans
While Omicron impacted almost every country in the world and broke records of daily infections. Travel bookings in Europe continued to increase both in January as well as in February when compared to the previous month. Italy, Spain, Germany, France are all witnessing 30% MoM travel bookings. As mentioned earlier, almost all major countries made up for the booking deficit that happened in January due to the Omicron wave. The United States which witnessing almost a million cases a day – did not see any dip in travel bookings and grew by 5% between December and January
International travel driving demand up in metro cities
India is looking to resume International travel next week after a period of two years, which will help in bringing back tourists, and help in direct as well as indirect job creation in a sector which has been a key contributor to the GDP of India. To track the immediate impact of international travel, RateGain’s Demand-AI suggests that demand in Delhi will increase by over 150% as compared to last year on April 2, 2022 which is the first weekend after international travel will resume. Similarly, travel demand in Mumbai, will increase by 51% as compared to last year. The increase is significant to note – as in 2021 this was the long Holi weekend and travel recovery was at all time high before the Delta wave hit India in April. An emerging trend was also noticed across cities in India, where bookings surged across cities in February as the COVID wave came down with cities like Jaipur, Ahemdabad, Aurangabad, Jammu, Bangalore, Delhi registering a 40-50% growth in bookings. However cities like Mumbai, Goa, Mysore, Pondicherry lead the pack with MoM bookings increase between 70-90%.
The report is based on the analysis of over 30 million bookings from over 191000 hotels globally and 2000 hotels in India that are all connected to RateGain's distribution platform. RateGain's platform is connected to 400+ OTAs globally and the analysis is derived by booking data processed by this platform.
Future demand data for Delhi and Mumbai have been provided by Demand AI - that uses sources like airline capacity, bookings, searches, social media, news, weather, covid cases and vaccination numbers to predict what the demand in a city looks like. This demand is built by an AI model that constantly monitors these data points to adjust the demand and provide a real-time view. The demand data was last refreshed on March 22, 2022.
