WTTC Launches New Travel Demand Dashboard

The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) has launched a new data dashboard highlighting the recovery of travel demand across flights and hotels and the shifting intentions of tourists through online searches.

The Interactive COVID-19 Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard provides users easy access to data at the global and regional levels by revealing travel demand since the beginning of the year, which is updated bi-weekly..

Free to all visitors, the WTTC dashboard offers information based on two factors, Google trends and searches, as well as bookings via research partners. ForwardKeys is providing flight data for the project and STR is sharing 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 re-start and map out the path to its recovery,” WTTC President Gloria Guevara said in a statement.

“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,” Guevara continued.

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

The dashboard has already shown that while search for travel interest is still lower than last year, Europe is leading the recovery with searches now down just 20 percent. Adventure travel searches are also thriving again, as the numbers are down just 10 percent compared to 2019.

In countries such as France and Germany, adventure travel searches are 50-70 percent above last year’s levels.