June 1, 2020– Each country is approaching the end of its lockdown a bit differently, and DerbySoft can see that European countries are willing to open for this year’s travelers sooner rather than later. As a whole, DerbySoft is monitoring the metasearch queries to identify current trends and shifts in traffic and demand.
Over the last couple of weeks, DerbySoft has noticed significant increases in the metasearch activity for hotels located in Europe. For this week, DerbySoft takes a closer look at the current situations in Germany and Spain, specifically.
GERMANY
As neighboring countries began to partially re-open on May 16, the hotels located in Germany started to receive more clicks on metasearch channels. Germany has become one of the most dynamic destinations in Europe with expectations of more clicks for hotels when more travel restrictions are lifted in mid-June, while at the same time, Germany allows more non-neighboring countries to enter. All of this shows that Germany is one of Europe’s first countries to show some signs of recovery.
The click levels over the past few days are steadily increasing and reaching around 20% of last year’s numbers. The booking trend is also looking good, and there are significant spikes in the second half of the June.
Although about 80% of all metasearch traffic for German properties is domestic, DerbySoft can see an increasing demand from international travelers with much shorter booking windows than originally perceived.
SPAIN
On Saturday May 23rd, Spain announced that it will lift the mandatory 14-day quarantine for international visitors starting on July 1st. This definitely impacted the hotel searches for Spain, and DerbySoft can see a spike in the metasearch booking index starting from that day. Both clicks and bookings show positive trends in the past few days and are expected to increase these numbers day-over-day.
Almost 30% of all international metasearch traffic from properties in Spain is coming from the users based in the United Kingdom, where as 15% are coming from French users then followed by 8% from Germany. Since the government’s announcement of opening the country to international travelers, the searched booking windows became significantly shorter. At the beginning of the month, DerbySoft saw booking windows of 100-160 days where as today, these booking windows are roughly twice as shorter than before.
Yes, these numbers look good, however, there is still room for growth, and DerbySoft looks forward to sharing data in the coming weeks.
