TravTalk Middle East Online Magazine
Oxford Economics highlights the outlook of the market and helps understand sectorial growth.
Shehara Rizly
Over the past few months countries are strengthening their vaccination drive to ensure confidence and provide initiatives to restart travel. The outlook depends on factors such as vaccination rates, mutations of the virus, economic growth in key origin markets and innovation by destinations and this could be to deal with and open up borders as COVID comes under control, it could be policy coordination between governments, marketing strategies taking advantage of social media and other digital means, events such as Expo or the FIFA World Cup or ATM and important policy stimulation by the governments in the region such as visa reform or supporting destinations. Overall, this should generate a significant uptake in tourism looking forward, this would be led by domestic tourism which could be back to pre-crisis levels by the turn of the year and surely followed by local tourism.
The longer haul travel faces more headwinds and takes longer to recover, and travel will ultimately be driven by leisure travel. Drivers will include economic growth in origin markets, the significant extra saving in key origin markets there could be a construing which will benefit travel and tourism in the region, we do expect business travel to return to pre-crisis levels over the next few years because some networking interactions business cannot be done via technology.
