Keeping up with COVID-19’s effects on the travel industry, including the shifting intentions of travellers, is a little easier thanks to the launch of a new in-depth data dashboard by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC).

The tool is designed to provide qualitative and quantitative data to provide insights crucial to help the Travel and Tourism sector re-start and map out the path to its recovery.

The Dashboard tracks the recovery of travel demand across flights and hotels, through online travel searches and provides users with easy access to 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 and is updated on a biweekly basis.

The Dashboard offers a useful way to navigate through a vast array of data as travel demand around the world changes, in response to the gradual reopening of country’s borders as travel restrictions are across the globe are eased.

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.

“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 and also online travel searches, as well as consumer confidence,” says WTTC President and CEO Gloria Guevara.

“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. With one in four jobs new jobs being generated by the Travel and Tourism sector in the last five years, it’s more important than ever that easy access to data on a regional and global level help inform the right choices at the right time.”

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 and Beach and Travel Services. Each segmentation has been devised using a set of 20 keywords, covering popular activities, sites and destinations. The segments provide insights at both the regional level and for key Travel and Tourism countries, such as the UK, the US, France and Brazil.

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.

In addition, Global Rescue, the Travel and Tourism global leader and pioneer in medical, security, travel risk and crisis management, provides data showing how ‘open’ each country or key market is, in the context of travel restrictions imposed to combat coronavirus.

WTTC has and continues to play a leading role in driving the Travel and Tourism towards policies which will enable the sector to recovery more quickly from the ravages of the pandemic.

According to WTTC’s 2020 Economic Impact Report, during 2019, Travel and Tourism was responsible for one in 10 jobs (330 million total), making a 10.3% contribution to global GDP and generating one in four of all new jobs.

The dashboard can be found HERE.