ITB Now: A Closer Look at How Travel Will Fare

The coronavirus pandemic along with lockdown measures and the ongoing debate about how to adequately deal with the latest developments continues to be omnipresent in early 2021. 

Nevertheless, vaccination rollouts and the arrival of spring and summer offer hope that normality may return soon. For many people holidays and travel have become an interesting topic again.

After the pandemic a sharp upturn is expected in the travel industry. Travel startups and new technologies have been booming for years and topical trends are appearing. 

ITB Berlin and Statista are examining the latest industry developments and among other aspects are taking a close look at sustainable travel, which is playing an increasingly important role. The focus is also on traditional and ever-popular beach holidays, and the result is a broad overview of the future of the travel industry.

Among Germans, beach holidays are by far the most popular type of holiday – Nature experiences and outdoor activities have become more relevant during the coronavirus pandemic

Data from Statista‘s Global Consumer Survey (GCS), one of the world’s largest consumer surveys, shows that German preferences for popular types of holiday have remained more or less stable during the crisis. Thus in 2018 over half of the German citizens polled between the ages of 18 and 64 said they favoured beach holidays, which emerged the clear winner among the various types of holiday. 

Visiting family and friends, weekend trips and staying at all-inclusive resorts occupied second, third and fourth place respectively. In 2020, all holiday figures suffered a sharp decline, along with turnover in the tourism sector.

In most cases, though, the popularity rankings have remained stable, holidaying in mountain and lake regions along with nature experiences and outdoor activities as well as the time-honoured camping holiday have risen in popularity (mountains and lakes from sixth to fifth place, camping holidays from ninth to seventh). 

Activities usually associated with city tourism such as sightseeing and shopping trips have dropped places, (sightseeing from fifth to sixth, shopping trips from seventh to eighth). Beach holidays were easily the most popular again in 2020.

The trend towards holidaying in nature in Germany, which has increased during the coronavirus pandemic, is reflected in relatively frequent Google searches for certain keywords. 

In the summer of 2020 searches for ‘hiking’ and ’cycle tours’ were much more frequent than in 2019. This trend towards holidaying in nature is also confirmed by the page hits on Germany’s most popular websites for outdoor activities, which also registered a large increase in visitors in 2020. 

Data from Rascasse GmbH, an AI-based platform offering insights into consumer behaviour, currently reports that more than two million Germans are interested in hiking, of whom close to 58 percent are women and 42 percent are men with an average age of about 32. 

This target audience takes environmental awareness and climate change very seriously. Interest in hiking appears to be particularly widespread in southern Germany. What is striking is that nationwide the highest interest in sustainable travel is also found in the same region. 

Overall, sustainable travel appears to be an increasingly important topic for the tourism industry. Rascasse currently identifies a target audience of around 3.1 million Germans, about twice the figure for 2018. As well as liking outdoor activities, they are interested in sustainably produced clothing, fashion blogs and the social media platform Instagram.