Flight Centre Travel Group, one of the world’s largest travel retailers, recently surveyed its customers and noticed a huge leap in positive attitudes about travel.
The survey was conducted in JUN and involved almost 2,000 participants. Its upward trend is in line with other recent travel surveys Open Jaw has reported on, like a JUN TripAdvisor survey that showed vaccinated people planned to spend more on travel or the increasingly positive attitudes towards the Canada-US border reopening.
When asked how people are “feeling” right now about travel, 254 per cent more respondents are “excited” than in NOV 2020. Correspondingly, those “worried” about travel dropped from 47 per cent in November to just 14.6 per cent last month.
Other key findings include:
- Customers are no longer considering sudden cancellations to be a deterrent to travel, with more than a third of travellers booking three to five months in advance of their departure.
- 67.2 per cent of those surveyed said that the progress of Canada’s vaccination program has made them more confident to travel. Given that more Canadians have continued to achieve full vaccination in the month since the survey was conducted, consumer confidence is expected to grow even more as more progress, including vaccinating children, continues.
- Canadians are prioritizing vaccinated travel experiences. 79 per cent of respondents say they will “definitely” or “probably” travel to countries accepting fully vaccinated travellers in the next 12 months.
- 38 per cent are planning to travel in the next 1-3 months, more than double the NOV 2020 survey results in which just 16 per cent of respondents felt the same.
- Overall, 85 per cent of customers expect to travel equally or more frequently than they did pre-COVID)
- In terms of which destinations people plan to travel to first internationally, 68 per cent of respondents are planning to go to Mexico and the Caribbean with the Mayan Riviera, Puerto Vallarta, Dominican Republic and Jamaica seeing the most demand within the region. 42 per cent are planning to go to Europe.
From a product standpoint, the return of cruise travel is definitive though not in short-term bookings. Specifically, MAY to SEP 2022 encompasses the largest share of future cruise bookings.
