Hotels in the U.S. continued their steady their pace of hiring in August, recording higher job growth in August than in July.
25.08.2023 - 14:36 / skift.com / Rashaad Jorden / Jay Shabat / Peden Doma Bhutia / Pedro Castillo
Good morning from Skift. It’s Tuesday, January 10, and here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
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Global airline passenger traffic has struggled to make a complete recovery largely due to China’s travel curbs enacted early during the pandemic. New data reveals worldwide passenger traffic in November only hit 75 percent of pre-Covid levels, reports Jay Shabat, senior analyst from Airline Weekly, a Skift brand.
Shabat writes that China, which only recently fully reopened its borders to international flights, loomed large over the figures revealed by the International Air Transport Association. Airlines based in the larger Asia-Pacific region, including China, barely saw airline traffic reach half of November 2019 levels. Latin American airline traffic was down 8 percentage points from pre-Covid levels while North America recorded a 3 percentage point drop.
The aviation industry’s global trade group is urging governments not to implement Covid testing requirements for inbound Chinese travelers, arguing that reintroducing testing for visitors from China will do little to contain the spread of Covid. However, dozens of countries have recently imposed new restrictions on Chinese travelers.
Next, tourism businesses in Thailand are still having a hard time recovering from the pandemic. So the arrival of large numbers of Russian tourists — limited in travel options due to countries worldwide closing their airspace to Russian airlines — has been a godsend for Thailand’s travel industry, reports Asia Editor Peden Doma Bhutia.
As one innkeeper said Russian visitors have helped rejuvenate establishments battered by Covid, Bhutia writes the resumption of direct flights from Russia to Thailand has contributed significantly to boosting Russian visitation. Russian arrivals in Thailand increased sevenfold from September to November last year. Russia also represented Thailand’s third largest source market for tourism arrivals, after Malaysia and India, in November.
Thailand is expecting the surge in Russian tourists to continue into 2023. The Southeast Asian nation anticipates more than 1 million visitors from Russia this year, just short of the 2019 figure of 1.5 million.
We end today in Peru. The South American country has seen its tourism recovery upended by civil unrest and violent protests that started in December, writes Global Tourism Reporter Dawit Habtemariam.
Peru’s ongoing political crisis — during which President Pedro Castillo was removed from office — is delivering an enormous blow to the country’s tourism industry, Habtemariam writes. Large-scale protests in December blocked roads, bridges and railways in much of the country and
Hotels in the U.S. continued their steady their pace of hiring in August, recording higher job growth in August than in July.
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Sun Country Airlines CEO Jude Bricker believes it’s premature to draw firm conclusions about the emergence of new travel patterns seven months into the travel industry’s recovery. But Bricker said at the recent Skift Aviation Forum that surging airfares are changing travelers’ behaviors, including driving more consumers to fly on Tuesdays instead of the weekend.
U.S. hotels added 10,000 jobs in December, a decrease from the previous month amid the hotel industry’s ongoing inability to approach pre-Covid employment levels.
Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, January 5, and here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.
Chinese travelers cite financial constraints over the last three years as the leading reason for not wanting to travel abroad even as China decided to end its zero-Covid policy by easing travel restrictions, according to a report.
Fly91, a new Indian airline named after the country’s telephone code, is aiming to take advantage of India’s rising middle class by focusing its services on second and third-tier cities.
India is projected to surpass a rapidly aging China as the world’s most populous country this year, a development that Skift founder and CEO Rafat Ali and Senior Research Analyst Seth Borko said would have enormous implications for the travel industry during the Skift Megatrends event in New York City on January 10.
Having witnessed a stronger than expected recovery in 2022, the Middle East could see international tourist arrivals return to pre-pandemic levels this year, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). Data from the UNWTO World Tourism Barometer noted that while all regions enjoyed significant increase in international arrivals in 2022 over the previous year, the Middle East recorded the strongest relative increase as international tourist numbers climbed to 83 percent of pre-pandemic numbers last year. “The region welcomed large events such as Expo 2020 Dubai and the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, as well as a highly attended Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia,” noted UNWTO in its report. “UNWTO anticipates a strong year for the sector even in the face of diverse challenges including the economic situation and continued geopolitical uncertainty,” Secretary General Zurab Pololikashvili said. UNWTO noted that over 900 million tourists travelled internationally in 2022, which was double the number of those who travelled in 2021 though still 37 percent below 2019.