Travel in Ukraine

One of the enduring lessons for tourism as the world emerges from the pandemic is that it really all starts from the ground up — with communities, healthy communities that build the foundation to create a thriving tourism trade.

No, you weren’t just imagining your social media timelines full of all your friends posting from Istanbul and Turkey this summer. It happened to be true.

Ireland’s overseas inbound tourism level for the year is set to hit 75 percent of 2019 levels, CEO of Tourism Ireland Niall Gibbons told The Sunday Times (London).

Ryanair on Monday posted its largest ever after-tax profit for its key summer season and said it expected very strong passenger and fare growth for years to come as customers switch from higher-cost rivals.

Norwegian Cruise Line grew its occupancy level despite increasing its pricing in the third quarter. The cruise company expects it will fill its ships in 2023 even with higher pricing and uncertain macroeconomic conditions, executives said during an earnings call Tuesday.

A mix of international tensions, economic turmoil, and political tension is causing many travelers to rethink the destinations they’re prioritizing on their “bucket lists” in 2023, according to an article on Wednesday in Toronto’s The Globe and Mail.

Travel has always offered an escape from the ordinary. But it has classically offered escapism by creating what you might call “sensory deprivation bubbles.” It conjured the fantasy that troubles didn’t exist within the space of their resorts, cruise ships, theme parks, and first-class cabins. 

Software developer Victor Varlamov logs in every morning to work on a sunny Spanish island off the coast of Africa after the prospect of steep heating bills and a winter made harsher by the Ukraine war drove him to leave his adoptive home in Poland.

As high electricity bills have closed most hotels along Croatia’s Adriatic coast ahead of the winter season, the mayor of the Dalmatian port town of Makarska is making plans to make it energy-sustainable by turning to solar energy sources.

Carnival CEO Josh Weinstein said, during Wednesday’s earnings call for its fiscal fourth quarter that ended on November 30, some consumers are a bit weary about booking cruises with Covid and flu cases on the rise. But that didn’t dampen his optimism about 2023 with Carnival seeing a surge in bookings for the new year, after years of seeing its business being dogged by the pandemic with onboard outbreaks, deaths, and plenty of bad publicity.

A full recovery in airline passenger volumes in Europe has been pushed back to 2025 from 2024, the body representing European airports said on Tuesday, revising the industry’s optimistic tone about its post-Covid recovery.

While 2022 was a post-pandemic boom year for hotel demand in much of the world, total global hotel investment volume decelerated slightly to $71.9 billion, a decline of 2 percent relative to 2021. The relative lack of outbound Chinese hotel investment, the Russian war in Ukraine, and recessionary pressures in several markets tamped down the pace of growth.

The Gulf region now has more than 170,000 hotel rooms under active development, which includes planning, final planning and under construction, according to research conducted at the end of September by STR, a hotel market intelligence and global benchmarking company. This active hotel development pipeline now equals 40 percent of the Gulf region’s existing hotel room inventory, a figure almost four times greater than the global average of 11 percent. The STR report estimates 135,560 existing rooms in Saudi Arabia with an active pipeline of 82,639 rooms, with total room inventory projected for 2030, at over 218,000 rooms. Similarly for the United Arab Emirates, the research currently tracks more than 202,000 existing rooms with an active pipeline of 48,910 rooms, a combined total of almost 251,000 rooms by 2030. “Interestingly, Ras Al Khaimah, is second only to Dubai, with 5,076 rooms in its pipeline, almost the same amount as Sharjah, Abu Dhabi and Fujairah combined,” said Danielle Curtis, exhibition director of Arabian Travel Market. The research had been commissioned by Arabian Travel Market.

Travel giant TUI (TUIGn.DE) reported on Friday a boost in demand for luxury holidays, driving sales for the winter 2022/23 period higher than they had been in the corresponding 2018/19 period, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit international travel.

Airfares on key corporate travel routes are expected to rise by as much as 25 percent in 2023 amid high fuel prices, a stronger U.S. dollar and labour and aircraft shortages, a forecast from American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT) showed.

Whether it is out of ego or for personal financial incentives, companies sometimes do mergers and acquisitions for the wrong reasons, and many academic studies show that takeover deals generally turn out to be “losers.”

It was the news everyone was waiting for. Finally the U.S. government set a date, Nov 8. 2021, to reopen its borders.

An innkeeper in Bangkok’s Sathorn area has been desperately looking to hire more staff to cater to the increasing number of tourists at his place.

Russians have this year shunned Vietnam, traditionally a popular retreat for its travellers, with a war-induced halt on direct flights and the appeal of rival destinations among factors that have kept its biggest-spending visitors at bay.

Saudi Arabia, which has bid to host the Expo 2030 world fair, is pushing ahead with plans to turn its capital Riyadh into a major global metropolis, a government official said on Thursday.

Both the Middle East and Europe are on track to reach their pre-pandemic levels in 2023 , according to the UN World Tourism Organization. Last year saw a stronger than expected recovery for the global tourism economy.