From Florida to Amsterdam, how the travel rebound after Covid-19 is going
- The US and Europe reopened to travellers in 2021, and some destinations have had significantly more visitors than before Covid-19; others, though, are way down
- Places with access to outdoor attractions such as mountains and beaches fared much better than cities dependent on business travel
If the travel industry were sending out holiday cards, here’s what they would say: “We’re grateful 2021 wasn’t as bad as 2020. But here’s to more trips in 2022.”
Although Asia remained shut fairly tight, the US and Europe had been getting back to something approaching normal before the arrival of the Omicron variant. But the reality is that the travel recovery was not where many people expected it to be; people have generally been restrained about the types of trips they are taking, preferring to visit family and keep leisure trips relatively local.
It’s a fundamental reshaping of the way we explore the world, with profound implications for the destinations recovering fastest and slowest.
The trend shows that “if you’re leisure-oriented, with access to beaches or mountains, you did well – or you did really well”, says Jan Freitag, senior vice-president for lodging insights at global hospitality data and analytics company STR. If you have typically relied heavily on business tourism, as many cities do, the opposite was true.
According to indexes from STR compiled exclusively for Bloomberg, these were the best- and worst-performing destinations in Europe and the US in 2021. The figures for each destination are based on a hotel industry metric called “revenue per available room”, or RevPAR, which factors average nightly prices and overall hotel occupancy.
The index divides current performance of the local market by a 2019 benchmark, comparing data from January 1, 2021, through to the end of November against the same period two years ago.