The travel intelligence experts at ForwardKeys say Chinese travelers will return to Europe to celebrate Chinese New Year at the end of January, reversing a downward trend at the end of 2016. With terrorist threats on the minds of most Chinese travelers, the upward trend is welcome news to businesses dependent on these virbant travelers. as of December 30th, bookings in Europe 30 December 2016, bookings to Europe for the start of the Chinese lunar calendar year on 28 January were 68.5% ahead compared to a 7.4% fall in visitor numbers last year.
As of December 30th, bookings in Europe for the start of the Chinese lunar calendar year on 28 January were up 68.5% compared to a 7.4% fall in visitor numbers last year. Despite the positive outlook though, ForwardKeys cautions that the 68.5% number may not be a true identifier. Still, benchmarked against the same period in 2015 – before terrorist threats damaged European tourism – bookings are still +56% ahead, with Northern European and Central/Eastern European destinations showing the greatest gains in popularity.
Also in the ForwardKeys data, international Chinese air travel bookings to all destinations from December are ahead by 9.8%, with most departures concentrated in the 4 days just before Golden Week. In Europe, Spain is the fastest-growing destination for Chinese to celebrate their New Year, according to Forwardkeys, up 89%, just ahead of the UK at 88% and Italy at 59%. Central and Eastern Europe are also seeing more bookings according to the service. Olivier Jager, CEO of ForwardKeys, offered this:
“Yet again, we see that Chinese travelling abroad for the New Year is a driver of global growth which is good news for business. But the real news is that Chinese travel trends are evolving – Chinese travellers are becoming more adventurous; they are prepared to seek out new destinations. What’s also interesting is the return to Europe, demonstrating tourism’s resilience to the terrorist threats that impacted the region last year.”
ForwardKeys predicts future travel patterns by crunching and analyzing 14m booking transactions a day. It is used by companies operating in the global travel ecosystem to monitor and anticipate traveler arrivals and stay ahead of the trends from a particular origin market at a specific time.
The analysis enables you to anticipate the impact of events, better manage staffing levels, adjust and measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts and predict future market trends.