WTTC Launches COVID-19 Travel Recovery Dashboard

The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) has launched a new in-depth 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 one-stop Interactive COVID-19 Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard was developed by WTTC, which represents the global Travel & Tourism private sector, with support from McKinsey & Company.

This unique 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.

Free to all WTTC Members and non-members, the Dashboard presents two distinct views based on Google trends and searches, and bookings via WTTC’s research partners in the project.

Global experts in business intelligence, tourism and travel trends, ForwardKeys, provide flights data, while premium data benchmarking, analytics and marketplace insights provider for global hospitality sectors, STR, shares hotel occupancy levels.

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 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.

WTTC has and continues to play a leading role in driving the Travel & Tourism towards policies which will enable the sector to recovery more quickly from the ravages of the pandemic.

According to WTTC’s 2020 Economic Impact Report, during 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.

The Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard can be found here.