Amadeus-Shaping-the-Future-of-Travel-MacroTrends-Report

Shaping the Future of Travel
Macro trends driving industry growth over the next decade
1 Global Travel Trends
1.1 Worldwide Trends
Global travel rebounded rapidly from the 2009 financial crisis and is forecast
to grow robustly over the next decade. Global overnight visitor flows are
comparable with global trade flows. We expect global overnight visitor flows
to grow at 5.4% per annum over the next decade, significantly faster than
GDP growth of 3.4% and more in line with the expected expansion in global
trade flows of 5.8%.
Although global overnight tourist flows dipped briefly at the peak of the financial
crisis in 2009, they have since rebounded and continued to increase at a healthy
rate of 16.5% from 2009 through 2012. This is slightly higher than the 15%
growth rate experienced before the financial crisis from 2004 to 2007.
Chart 1.1: Global overnight visitor flows, 2002-2023
Millions
8,000
7,000
6,000
5,000
4,000
Forecast
3,000
2,000
1,000
0
2002 2006 2010 2014 2018 2022
Source: Oxford Economics
The Oxford Economics Tourism Decision Metrics (TDM) model forecasts visitor
flows as a derivative of outbound visitor spending. As the global economy
continues to recover, and given our forecasts for personal income and business
spend growth, we forecast an average annual growth rate for visitor flows of
5.4% over the next decade. This is an acceleration of the 4.1% growth rate
experienced over the 2009-2012 period. Outbound global travel spending 1
follows a broadly similar trend to that of overnight tourism flows, with predicted
average annual growth of 5.4% from 2013 through 2023.
1 Defined as spending by residents on travel in foreign countries (exports).
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