Travel, Tourism & Hospitality
New report highlights Covid impact on global travel industry
Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm, has collaborated with Google to assess the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global travel and tourism business and its impact on Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs).
Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm, has collaborated with Google to assess the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the global travel and tourism business and its impact on Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs).
The new report, titled “Actions for Destination Marketers to Navigate in a Covid-19 World”
looks at how people’s attitude towards travel changed and how "Destination Marketing Organizations" can prepare for the eventual resumption of travel or more unexpected future changes.
The impact of Covid-19 has been far and wide, and one industry, in particular, has been hit the hardest.
According to the report, the global travel and tourism business has recorded sustained and successful growth for the past 20 years, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 5 percent, amounting to $4.7 trillion in 2019.
With the effects of Covid-19, a decline in international and commercial passengers around the globe could lead to a loss of up to 58% of jobs (190 million) in the travel and tourism industry and cut the industry’s contribution to global GDP by up to $5.5 trillion (62%), it stated.
BCG Managing Director and Senior Partner Pablo Martinez said: "The continued success of the global travel and tourism industry in the last two decades can be attributed directly to DMOs, as they generate the required demand for tourism by building destinations’ brands and raising traveler awareness about their respective destination offerings."
"The unpredictable nature of the pandemic has made it quite challenging for DMOs to plan and develop their tourism strategies. Our new research with Google is intended to provide DMOs with a perspective on how consumers’ attitudes toward travel have changed in response to the pandemic and imperatives to navigate the coming future," he noted.
Trends in consumer preference in travel demands have shifted, creating the unpredictability nature in DMOs businesses. Google searches in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) show that “cancel flight” queries increase by 259 percent in March 2020, compared to January 2020. Moreover, the growth of “staycation” related searches increased by over 400 percent since March.