USA. ForwardKeys, the travel analytics firm, has revealed a strong last-minute in air travel bookings in the US for the Thanksgiving period (19-25 November).
VP Insights Olivier Ponti explained: “The COVID-19 crisis has decimated international air travel and badly damaged domestic air travel. In the past three weeks, we have seen the pace of bookings decelerate and that correlates with the third wave of the virus. However, there are a couple of highly resilient periods, Christmas and Thanksgiving, where bookings have not slowed down and are relatively much stronger than they are for the rest of the year. Flight tickets issued in the week commencing 8 November, for travel over the Thanksgiving period (departures from 19–25 November) surged to 74.5% of last year’s volumes.”
In a ranking of major US domestic destinations (destinations with at least a 1% share of domestic flight bookings), many of the most resilient are family holiday destinations.
Benchmarked against performance in 2019, Fort Myers in Florida leads the list (full rankings below). As of 14 November, bookings for travel over the Thanksgiving period were -11.9% behind last year’s levels. It is followed by another sunshine destination, Tampa, where bookings were -14.2% behind.
The next three most resilient places are Salt Lake City, Utah, -23.5% behind; Phoenix, Arizona, -30% and Denver, Colorado, -32.1%. The next five cities are Miami, -33.5%; Orlando, -33.9%; Kahului, -35.4%; Dallas, -38.6% and Las Vegas, -40.6%.
Ponti concluded: “While hardly anybody is travelling on business, the encouraging news for the travel industry is that people don’t want to drop what they usually do for Thanksgiving and are keen to travel. As going abroad is much more of a hassle owing to COVID-19 travel restrictions, we are seeing a greater proportion of Thanksgiving bookings being domestic, 91% this year, compared to 79% last year. There is even room for a little more optimism, because with booking trends being increasingly last-minute, numbers will likely climb further this week.”
