WTTC Launches COVID-19 Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard

LONDON—A new in-depth data dashboard highlighting the recovery of travel demand across flights and hotels, as well as revealing the shifting intentions of travelers through online travel searches, has been launched by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC).

The one-stop data shop, the Interactive COVID-19 Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard, was developed with support from McKinsey & Company. It 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 biweekly basis.

According to the WTTC, 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 countries’ borders as travel restrictions across the globe are eased. Free to use by all, it presents two distinct views based on Google trends and searches, and bookings via WTTC’s research partners in the project. ForwardKeys provides flight data, while STR shares hotel occupancy levels.

“We have created a unique dashboard featuring qualitative and quantitative data to provide the insights which could be crucial to help the travel & tourism sector restart and map out the path to its recovery,” said Gloria Guevara, WTTC president/CEO. “Our dashboard will enable decision makers to track the impact of public policies by monitoring the positive and negative fluctuations of flight and hotel bookings and also online travel searches, as well as consumer confidence. Data is essential for businesses, government and other organizations to make informed choices and drive the policy which will revive a sector that has suffered disproportionately due to the pandemic. With one in four new jobs being generated by the sector in the last five years, it’s more important than ever that easy access to data on a regional and global level help inform the right choices at the right time.”

The new data dashboard offers insights through two main avenues. The first is via Google Trends, where all the data sourced has been organized into easy-to-understand 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 U.S., the U.K., France and Brazil.

The second comes via regional insights through bimonthly updates on movements and bookings, with flight information from WTTC’s research partner ForwardKeys, hotel occupancy and ADR from STR and the Google Mobility Index, which shows local recreational activity.

In addition, Global Rescue provides data showing how open each country or key market is, in the context of travel restrictions imposed to combat the coronavirus.