Spanish Outbound Rebounds

No,  I don’t mean this blog is rebounding. I hope you’ll forgive me but I have recently started a new job and continue to be chairman of Interface Tourism Spain and father of 3 kids so I’m afraid time available for selfless sharing of market intelligence is limited to a window between 11.45 pm and 3.00 am. However, I did think that this press release by my friends at ForwardKeys was worth sharing.

Sebastian Cron of Forwardkeys handed me this release in one of many chance meetings in the corridors of this year’s FITUR. By the way, FITUR, as usual, claimed record numbers of visitors (both trade and public) with trade visitors up 5%. I am always sceptical of their “official” figures and to my eyes the show had definitely shrunk again in floor space. That said there was undoubtedly more business being done this year and a more positive and optimistic atmosphere in general. Also a couple of my clients, who had been notably absent for the last few years were back again this year (Chile, Philippines) and both said the ROI from participation was better than when they were last here.

Anyway the title “Spanish Outbound Tourism Rebounds” was Forwardkeys’ and not mine and here is the rest of their press release word for word:

Forward Keys, which monitors future travel patterns by analysing ~70m booking transactions a day, crunching more daily traveller data than anyone else, is seeing 6.3% growth in bookings for international departures from Spain during the first quarter of 2015.

Olivier Jager, Co-founder and CEO, Forward Keys, commented: “We are seeing highly encouraging booking trends. Spanish outbound bookings for travel in February are up by 10.7% and bookings for March are currently up by 46.5% compared to the equivalent time last year. This tells us that travellers are booking earlier and/or that there will likely be a bigger volume of departures in the first quarter of 2015. Whichever way you see it, these numbers are grounds for optimism.”

Looking at the top destinations for Spanish outbound, most countries are up on where they were at the same time last year. The big winners are the Middle East and Latin America. Bookings to the UAE are 41% up on last year, no doubt thanks to increased flight connectivity between Dubai and Spain, as well as various leisure and business events in the Gulf in January.

Bookings for Chile and Argentina also show a substantial increase compared to last year, up by 23.8% and 17.9% respectively, which can most likely be explained by a new code-share agreement between the Spanish national airline Iberia and the Latin American carrier TAM that makes it easier for Spanish travellers to go to South America.

The promising start to 2015 follows a recovery in 2014. Overall departure from Spain grew 3.2% last year, a welcome rebound from the 2012 global economic crisis, where yearly departures fell 6.2% from 2011.

Among the top destinations in 2014, the notable improvers were Turkey up 14%, the USA up 11%, Portugal up 9%, Germany up 7% and the UK up 5%.

Certainly cause for optimism then, particularly for long haul destinations. Just a warning from taking these figures too literally. Extremely valuable and eloquent though they are: Remember that ForwardKeys monitors only the flights booked using a GDS. Their analysis does not therefore include charter flights, low cost airlines or direct bookings not using GDS, or, of course any other forms of transport. In the case of European travel therefore the trends might be the same but you can’t really get an accurate picture of intra-european travel without including low-cost airlines, train or cars. Outbound flights booked using GDS systems (essentially Amadeus) have however increased in the last 12 months so the overall trend is undeniably positive.