Complete recovery of travel by 2025
Complete recovery of travel by 2025 by the projections of Global Data. Travel recovery must deal with inflation, rising living costs, and the war in Ukraine. The projection will be at 98% of 2019 levels by 2025.
Compared to 2019, pre covid period, the projections are as follows: 68% of international departures worldwide in 2022; with expectations to improve to 82% in 2023 and 97% in 2024; before a full recovery by 2025, to 101% of 2019 levels—the number of projected 1.5 billion international departures. However, GlobalData, a global analyst firm, reports that the pace of recovery in international departures is not linear between regions or countries.
Hannah Free, Travel and Tourism Analyst at GlobalData, comments:
“International departures from European countries are expected to reach 69% of 2019 levels in 2022. Furthermore, as travel confidence is restructured, the intra-European market will likely benefit from short-distance travel preferences.
“However, the recovery in travel must tackle inflation, the rising cost of living and the war in Ukraine. By 2025, international departures are projected to be at 98% of 2019 levels. Geographically, the war has not spread beyond the Ukrainian borders. However, Russia was the fifth-largest outbound tourism market globally in 2019, while Ukraine was the twelfth. “In the future, limited outbound travel from these countries will hinder Europe’s overall tourism recovery.”
It is expected that the Asia-Pacific region will lag in terms of recovery. There will only be 67% of the 2019 level of departures from the region in 2022. The lifting of travel restrictions will be slower and internal limits will be renewed during the COVID-19 epidemic. Once the world’s largest outbound tourism market, China shows no signs of easing its austerity measures in the short term. China had only 2% of its 2019 level of international departures in 2021.
According to Hannah Free, global international travel is on track to reach pre-pandemic levels by 2025, but tourism demand may appear quite different. Many long-term and short-term trends have emerged during the two years of minimal travel. As consumers, we seek authentic experiences, demanding personalized travel deals, combining business and leisure travel, and being more aware of our overall environmental impact. Unfortunately, there is still a long way to go before things return to normal. However, a possible full recovery by 2025 at the latest gives the travel and tourism industry reason to be optimistic.
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Photo by Katie Drazdauskaite on Unsplash
