Germans turned their backs on summer holiday bookings in December with a dramatic 8% decline, according to the latest monthly travel agency booking figures from market researchers GfK, which confirm other recent trend figures, according to fvw.
The drop in the final month of 2015 came as demand weakened dramatically following the terrorist attacks in Paris. In financial terms, German travel agencies had an €83 million ‘gap’ in revenues compared to December 2014. The 8% fall in December means that overall cumulated sales for summer 2016, which made up 65% of total sales last month, are now down by 6% compared to one year earlier.
Bookings for package holidays were most impacted while cruises showed ‘moderate’ growth of 4%, according to GfK’s monthly survey of German travel agents. In terms of destinations, bookings slumped for Turkey, Greece, Egypt and Tunisia and “could not be compensated” by increases of more than 20% for the Canary Islands, Portugal and Germany, the market researchers said.
Optimistic underlying situation
The strongest drop in bookings last month was for holidays in August, which were 19% down on the strong previous year. This is the peak travelling month when most German federal states have school summer holidays. October showed a 14% fall but July and June were relatively stable.
The slump also affected winter holiday bookings which fell by 8% compared to December 2014. The cumulative growth rate for winter 2015/16 fell back to 4.1% from 5.8% in November.
Dorte Nordbeck, Gfk’s head of Travel & Logistics Germany, commented: “Despite the current wait-and-see behaviour of German consumers, the consumption climate and economic conditions in Germany point to an optimistic underlying situation.” The monthly GfK Travel Insights representative survey analyses some 340,000 bookings made at 1,200 travel agencies.
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