As countries in Asia Pacific actively lift travel restrictions, Amadeus’ business intelligence data is showing strong recovery indicators for the remainder of 2022, and evidence of growing traveller confidence as the sector looks towards 2023. Maria Taylor, head of commercial, Hospitality, Asia Pacific, Amadeus, says: “It is extremely encouraging to see such positive hospitality trends in Asia Pacific. As countries start to ease restrictions, demand for travel looks set to continue to build in the forthcoming months. It is essential that hoteliers and destination marketers have accurate, forward-looking data insights to enable them to maximise their revenue strategies, confidently plan for larger groups, and consider their distribution mix to offer a wide variety of promotions and accommodations. With this insight, they can also understand more about who is travelling, enabling them to deliver a truly differentiated experience.”
For the months of July – September 2022, APAC hotel occupancy hit an average of nearly 60%, just three percentage points shy of the same months in 2019, according to Amadeus’ Demand360® data.
For September 2022, hotels in Singapore saw an occupancy average of 75% with a 13% growth in average daily rate and 10% increase in RevPAR compared with the same timeframe in 2019, while October 2022 bookings are outpacing pre-pandemic levels – a 2% increase from 3 years ago.
Mirroring the recovery of occupancy rates is the stabilisation of booking lead times. 2022 now virtually matches the booking behaviours seen in 2019 with 64% of global bookings made in the 0–7-day window versus 60% of bookings made in this timeframe in 2019. As booking lead times improve, this implies increasing traveller confidence as people make longer term commitments globally.
Moving from leisure to group travel, group occupancies in the region have consistently been between 2-3% of pre-pandemic levels as the conference sector rebounds in 2022. Australia and New Zealand are reporting strong conference season numbers for Q4. Looking ahead, Amadeus data shows that APAC group bookings are now also starting to extend more confidently into next year, with 1.8 million bookings already made for H1 2023.
Another segment seeing steady recovery as the year continues is business travel. 2022 is closing the gap to 2019 levels according to Amadeus’ Agency360® data, which reveals that APAC hotel bookings across all major global distribution systems (GDS) tripled in September compared to January 2022. At the start of this year, hotel booking volumes fell behind 2019 performance by 77%, but this gap has progressively closed over the months, with GDS bookings in September finishing 17% behind 2019 levels.
This is supported by a new Amadeus survey of global travel agents, in which 55% of agents from APAC say they are using GDS platforms more now than in 2019, the highest percentage out of all regions.
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