Variant increased vaccination levels and came when capacity was already low, says Carlos Cendra, director of sales and marketing at data analyst Mabrian
Every cloud has a silver lining, but in some cases that’s hard to accept. In the case of Omicron, it could be hard to imagine that anything good came from it.
But we’ve looked closely at all the recent data and have concluded: Omicron has accelerated the recovery of tourism.
At least, that’s the case in the main European outbound tourism source markets of the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and France.
How could that be the case? Essentially, Omicron pushed many more people to become fully vaccinated, and our research shows that all the main outbound markets for European holidays have seen quite significant jumps in vaccination rates during that time.
At the same time, many more people have now been infected than before, or have had their third dose, giving them temporary confidence that they can travel.
On that basis, it would be quite hard to argue that – leaving aside any damage it did back from November to January, and instead looking forward to the summer – the industry’s 2022 outlook would have been better off without Omicron.
We all know that Omicron resulted in cancellations at the time though, so how can it be the case that it drove the recovery for summer 2022? Not least as if you look at the air capacity figures for summer 2022, they seem to be falling sharply around the time of Omicron. That is despite vaccination rates going up.
We took a close look at the data. And when you consider that in the winter months capacity always falls substantially for seasonal destinations such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece and France, then actually during the Omicron impact months the capacity evolution for those destinations didn’t vary from ‘normal’ years. In other words, Omicron didn’t impact plans for summer 2022.
Others might have their own explanations and interpretations, but based on current scheduled capacity one thing is certain: inbound international arrivals for the main European destinations are essentially back to 2019 levels. Wonderful news for travel.
Looking at May 1-October 30, 2022, Portugal and Greece are already at +1% and +2% respectively of their 2019 air capacity.
Meanwhile Spain and Italy are only down by 1% and 2% respectively.
France is the only exception, at minus 19% compared to 2019, but still reaches a figure almost double that of 2021.
Better news still is the fact there is no indication that demand for domestic travel is falling across Europe, meaning, overall, destinations could see themselves seeing combined domestic and international visitor figures and occupancy rates higher than before the pandemic.
For destination marketeers out there considering where to invest to attract visitors, this leads us to believe that high vaccination markets should be the priority. The link between vaccines and recovery is undoubtable.
For those in parts of the world where this might be hard to do — ie. where all realistic source markets still have low levels of vaccination — at Mabrian we feel destinations can take some comfort from the fact that, over the longer-term, increased vaccination rates will drive the recovery for their destinations.
Clearly, vaccinations have been the key driving force for travel’s recovery and without increased rates Omicron would have been an awful health tragedy for many more, let alone a big tourism problem.
But this experience does show that sometimes things aren’t as bad as they at first seem and hopefully brings us all that little bit closer to what we all really need: a good holiday.