Check this out! WTTC unveils interactive COVID-19 travel demand recovery dashboard

A new in-depth data dashboard highlighting the recovery of travel demand has been launched by the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC). The specially designed innovative dashboard works across flights and hotels, as well as revealing the shifting intentions of travellers through online travel searches.

The one-stop data shop or Interactive COVID-19 Travel Demand Recovery Dashboard was developed by WTTC, which represents the global travel and tourism private sector, with support from McKinsey & Company. This unique tool provides users with easy access to qualitative and quantitative travel data at the global and regional level – as well as for 33 major countries around the world – by revealing travel demand since the beginning of the year. The dashboard is updated on a fortnightly basis.

Users can navigate their way through a vast array of data as travel demand around the world changes, in response to changing travel restrictions by countries across the globe. Free to all WTTC members and non-members, the Dashboard presents two distinct views based on Google trends and searches, and bookings via WTTC’s research partners in the project. Global experts in business intelligence, tourism and travel trends, ForwardKeys, provide flights data, while premium data benchmarking, analytics and marketplace insights provider for global hospitality sectors, STR, shares hotel occupancy levels.

Gloria Guevara, WTTC president and CEO, said: “We have created a unique dashboard featuring qualitative and quantitative data to provide the insights which could be crucial to help the Travel & Tourism sector restart and map out the path to its recovery. Our dashboard will enable decision makers to track the impact of public policies by monitoring the positive and negative fluctuations of flight and hotel bookings as well as online travel searches and consumer confidence. Data is essential for businesses, government and other organisations to make informed choices and drive the policy which will revive a sector that has suffered disproportionally due to the pandemic.”

The new data dashboard offers insights through two main avenues. The first is via Google Trends, where all the data sourced has been organised into easy-to-understand holiday or trip segments: Adventure, Culture, Urban, Family, Sun & Beach and Travel Services. Each segmentation has been devised using a set of 20 keywords, covering popular activities, sites and destinations.

The second comes via regional insights through bi-monthly updates on movements and bookings, with flight information from WTTC’s research partner ForwardKeys, hotel occupancy and average daily room rates from STR and the Google Mobility Index, which shows local recreational activity.