Market News
- Travel fair CMT starts in Stuttgart: The holiday fair CMT in Stuttgart is starting on Satursay this week. Until 20th January, more than 2100 exhibitors from tourism and leisure will present themselves at the Stuttgart exhibition center. Travel destinations from all over the world as well as novelties for camping and caravanning are presented. Special travel topics such as cycling, golf, wellness, cruise and boat trips are presented in their own exhibition areas at the weekends. The trade fair program also includes events for trade visitors, including the fvw Destination Germany Day on 15 January. In advance of the CMT, the results of the travel analysis of the Forschungsgemeinschaft Urlaub und Reisen (FUR) will be presented on Friday. The basis for the Germany-wide survey on holiday travel are more than 12,000 interviews on travel, experiences and vacation plans already made.
- Tourism makes a deficit in December: According to fvw, the survey of “Tats-Reisebüro-Spiegel” comes to the conclusion that the booking month of December did not go well. However, the annual balance for 2018 is positive. In December, the travel agencies affiliated with technology service provider Tats did not record any sales growth. This affects both incoming orders and departures. In December 2018, almost ten percent fewer travel trips were booked than in the same month of the year before. As a result, the order backlog will fall slightly until October 2019. A similar but less dramatic analysis had already been provided by GfK in its Travel insights. According to this, one percent less turnover was booked in December for the coming summer than in December twelve months earlier. In particular, the stationary travel agencies were responsible for this. However, summer at GfK is still cumulatively up three percent. Even the departed sales are, according to Tats in December, largely below last year. The biggest decline was recorded by air traffic (minus 7.1 percent), followed by tourism with minus 1.7 percent. This result would have been even worse without the cruise. The sales of sea voyages are namely 4.6 percent higher. However, the new bookings in this sub-division had also had to leave in December. They are with 3.5 percent in the minus. The order backlog until October 2019, however, is still six percent above the previous year. Since the “Tats-Reisebüro-Spiegel“ analyzes sales by calendar year, the annual balance sheet for 2018 is completed with the December analysis. And that does not look like a bad thing: tourism is up by 3.7 per cent, with the cruise segment growing almost twice as fast at 6.3 per cent. That the total turnover of the Tats travel agencies is only 2.5 per cent higher than in the year before, lies in the air traffic. Its sales show only a minor plus.
Aviation News
- Lufthansa Group remains number one in Europe: As stated by fvw, Germany’s leading travel trade magazine, Lufthansa claims its position as the largest airline group in Europe by acquiring parts of the bankrupt airline Air Berlin. In 2018, 142.3 million people flew with Lufthansa and its subsidiaries such as Eurowings, Swiss and Austrian Airlines. That was 10 percent more than the year before. Europe’s largest low-cost airline Ryanair, which had temporarily chased Lufthansa’s throne in 2016, remained behind with a good 139 million tickets sold. All Lufthansa Group airlines increased in 2018. Capacity utilization improved by 0.5 percentage points to the new high of 81.4 percent. In the cargo business, the development was more difficult. Thanks to increased flight availability, traffic rose by 0.8 percent to 10.9 billion tonne-kilometers. The utilization of cargo holds, however, worsened by 2.3 percentage points to 66.4 percent. In August 2017, the second largest German airline Air Berlin filed for bankruptcy. At the end of October 2017 the airline completed its last flight, its Austrian daughter Niki flew on until mid-December. For Lufthansa, there were many demands for airline tickets in this time, the ticket prices rose particularly on domestic German routes strongly. Later, the Lufthansa subsidiary Eurowings took over 77 aircraft and many employees of Air Berlin.
- Air fares from Germany are rising slightly this year: According to the German travel magazine Reisevor9, the reason for the rising air faires is the continuing demand for business travel, along with Lufthansa’s dominant position on the market. Their market share lies since the Airberlin bankruptcy and the subsequent acquisition of some routes at more than 90 percent, especially at the airports of Dusseldorf and Berlin. Thanks to the joint venture between Lufthansa and Air China, there is now less competition on the routes to China, with rising prices likely to result. Greater international competition on routes to North America and the Asia-Pacific region is expected to prevent a greater increase in fares to these destinations. Globally, the Air Monitor forecasts stable fares for 2019 due to competitive pressures and new low-cost long-haul airlines, despite likely slightly higher operating costs for airlines. With two exceptions: In North America, demand for premium classes is likely to increase more than capacity, meaning that prices on routes within the region and to Europe would also pick up. Targets in the Middle East, in turn, will decline according to the Amex GBT in both Business and Economy Classes. For the forecast, the team of Global Business Consulting in the database of American Express GBT examined the flight transactions of the past five years. This analysis was combined with variables such as oil prices, economic forecasts, and airlines’ strategies to predict price changes on major global business travel routes.
Tour Operator News
- Organizers watch snow chaos in Austria: As reported by fvw, in Tyrol and Salzburg, heavy snowfall causes chaos. Some places are cut off from the outside world. The organizers observe the situation in the ski areas. Occasionally there are repostings. It continues to snow in Austria. The avalanche danger in the Alps is rising. In some places people are stuck. As TUI Germany informs on request, all hotels in Austria, where currently guests of the company reside, can be reached. «We are in constant contact with our local partners and continue to monitor the situation closely,» states the organizer . Ameropa announces that so far only few bookings have been made. For customers who do not want to start their journey due to the current situation, an «accommodating solution» is sought. In each case, Ameropa inform themselves at the service partners on site, whether there is the possibility of a rebooking or cancellation. The number of actually stuck customers is manageable. Restrictions included traffic disruption, avalanche danger, and closures of slopes and ski resorts.
