Resumen novedades mercado alemán (en inglés)

A continuación, el resumen de  novedades del mercado alemán, segundo emisor de viajeros extranjeros a la Isla, de la última semana

• Airline news:
  • Lufthansa’s annual general meeting: Airline scores third record profit in a row: 2.4 billion Euro in the business year 2017 – German carrier Lufthansa’s CEO Carsten Spohr has a reason to smile at the annual general meeting this week in Frankfurt. He also predicts a growth of 1.5 percent for 2018. According to Spohr, Lufthansa could even cope with a shrinkage of up to 10 percent – but that’s a scenario “Lufthansa will hopefully never face”. Carsten Spohr also addressed the challenges of 2018 for airlines: geopolitic insecurities and rising fuel prices. Lufthansa is also still in the challenging process of incorporating 77 former AirBerlin crafts into the fleet, making it the “biggest integration task for quite some time”. The airline also shares a problem with international competitors: a lack of capacity. There is a worldwide shortage of pilots as well as aircrafts, because the producers cannot cope with the demand and new engine types have massive technical issues. Spohr therefore predicts a stop of the recent price drops – but calculates with growth for the branch nevertheless. “If experts are right, the number of passengers will double within the next 20 years”, said Spohr according to Handelsblatt.

 

• • Air France-KLM faces crisis: The CEO is gone, the employees angry, the stock price falling, 14 days of strike in only a few weeks – Air France-KLM is facing a severe crisis. CEO Jean-Marc Janaillac announced his resignation after his suggestions for a raise for the Air France-KLM employees were refused. Meanwhile, the French government, who is still holding 14 percent of the shares, is putting more and more pressure on the strikers, according to “Handelsblatt”. Bruno Le Maire, Minister of Finance and Economics said “The nation will not solve the problems and pay the debts of Air France, the carrier has to adapt its strategy to the likes of Lufthansa or British Airways”. Otherwise, the company might “disappear from the market”. This week, approximately 10 percent of Air France employees striked once again. According to Jean-Marc Janaillac, the strikes have already costed the company more than 300 million Euro.

 

• Market trends:

• • German tax authorities to check AirBnB lessors: Some AirBnB lessors had to hold their breath this week: According to “Wirtschaftswoche”, German tax authorities are going to check them for potential tax evasion. Tax authorities have officially sent a request for information to the AirBnB headquarter in Ireland. Caught AirBnB lessors will have to execute tax payments up to ten years in retrospective plus six percent of default interest per year as well as a notification of penalty and a fine due to illegal rental.

 

• • Tourism sector responsible for 8% of CO2 emissions: The influence of international tourism on global warming gases is bigger than expected: at 8 percent, according to the magazine “Nature Climate Change”. Unlike other studies that only focused on flights and hotels, researches from Sydney calculated the whole CO2 footprint of travelers including the whole supply chains. Germans produce 329 million tons CO2 equivalents per year through traveling. This means rank 3, after the USA and China. If the current trend doesn’t stop, the climate-damaging emissions will be at 6.5 billion tons by 2025.

 

• • Survey: “Social Influencers have low credibility”: 41 percent of influencers lose sympathy as soon as they cooperate with brands, especially if the brand isn’t a fit (74 percent) – 33 percent don’t like brand-influencer cooperations at all. These are the results of the “Influencer 2.0” survey, carried out by Waveform. To boost their credibility, influencers should mark their sponsored posts as advertising (66%), don’t do too many cooperations (64%) and choose fitting brands for their personalities (63%). Influencer marketing is heavily discussed, but also effective according to the research: 60 percent of 14 to 29 year olds have bought a product that has been praised by an influencer in the past 12 months, among the 30 to 39 year olds, there are still 52 percent saying that they’ve been influenced.

 

 

• Tour operator news:

• • Tour operators: Families drive summer comeback of Turkey: Struggling Turkey is celebrating a major comeback this summer. Package holiday bookings to Antalya have shown high double-digit growth rates in recent months, for instance an 86% rise in April, according to reservations provider Traveltainment. TUI announced Turkey as “Winner of summer 2018” last week, other tour operators confirm this development. Thomas Cook’s Turkey specialist Öger Tours reports a double-digit increase compared to last year, specialist Bentour had a dramatic increase of 165 percent in the first two to three months according to FVW. Both the average price and the length of stay have risen, indicating a return of family customers. DER Touristik is “satisfied with growth rates”, Alltours numbers have doubled, Schauinsland-Reisen has a 50% increase in sales. FTI apparently remains the leading German operator to Turkey, reporting an increased share of the Turkish market in terms of German guests to 22.3 percent last year. The three largest incoming agencies in terms of guests from all source markets were OTI, TUI group and ANEX Tour.

 

• • TUI focuses more on mobile business: “Mobile first” – TUI is taking this topic very seriously. Every third visit on the TUI website is via smartphone, according to the market leader. One of the major criteria is speed, therefore TUI invested in an optimization of the website. The result: a brandnew hotel booking page that is fully loaded within three seconds – even with poor network coverage. There is also a new booking tool to simplify the mobile booking process: Instead of typing all data, the customer only needs to fill in a mail address and a phone number. A TUI assistant will then call and finalize the booking via phone. TUI is focusing more and more on online – this year, TUI is calculating with a revenue of 600 million Euro only from online sales, 100 million more than 2017.

 

• • Families tend to book their domestic holidays directly: Holidays in Germany are a big trend and families are an important target group for tour operators. But only 7 percent book with a tour operator, the majority (42 percent) book directly with the accommodation. 22 percent find the perfect trip in online travel agencies, 8 percent look for options on the websites of their preferred destinations/cities in Germany. These are the results of a survey among 1.200 families with kids up to 12 years, conducted by the family online community Famigo and the University of Applied Sciences Heilbronn. Regarding the source of information, families give bad grades to travel agencies: two out of three don’t ask for help by agents, out of the remaining, 50 percent weren’t satisfied with the counseling. The most important sources for information about domestic travel are the accommodation website, followed by the pages of the destinations. Regarding the type of accommodation, Germans prefer holiday homes (46 percent), hotels (28%), stays at friends and relatives (15 percent) and B&Bs (12 percent).