Skyscanner Horizons Report

Transcript

Isla dos Santos:Hi, I'm Isla and I'm the Head of Flight for Skyscanner South America. I've been in the travel industry for over 10 years now, but I'm very honored to be here speaking for the first time at CAPA, especially because it's happening in Brazil, which not only is a focus market for myself and a key market for Skyscanner, but also because it's my home country. So thank you for having me today. In the next 10 minutes, we're going to look at some traveler trends that we have seen lately and also other emerging trends in traveler behavior. So if you haven't heard about Skyscanner before, we're the leading travel marketplace for flights, hotels, and car hire. And we're actually operating in 52 different countries, 30 or more languages available as well, and we have 19 million travelers visiting us each month. So now that we've seen recovery come back into the region and that travel restrictions have been lifted, it's more important than ever to use data-driven insights that are real-time and forward-looking. And in the past few years, we've been talking about reaching that same travel demand that we've had in 2019 as an industry, and it's been a big focus for us. The good news is that for the EMEA region, we finally reached that target only a few weeks ago, and now EMEA is officially on growth mode. And when we look at the Americas, we're not tracking too far behind. We're actually 86% of the way there in terms of travel demand. And it's been impulsed by markets that are fastly growing like Brazil, Colombia, and Canada. And when we look at APAC, which has been trailing behind for a while now, we've finally seen an uptick in growth in that region as well as more capacity comes into the market. There are still a lot of changes going on in the travel landscape, but I want to highlight 2 examples of how this recovery has been happening on a global nature. And global level. And between the months of July and June, we've seen a 40% increase month on month for domestic India bookings. And this relates to airlines like Air India and Singapore Airlines adding more capacity and frequencies to domestic routes. We're also seeing examples closer to home, like here in Brazil, where in the early August we noticed a 23% increase in bookings between Brazil and the US as airlines add more capacity to— oops. Yeah, as airlines add more capacity to high-season travel. When we look at LATAM week-on-week demand versus 2019, we're also seeing a very good trend for intercontinental and transcontinental travel, where we're seeing that the demand is growing beyond 2019 levels for a lot of those weeks. But when we look at the later weeks, we're seeing a bit of a trend down, and domestic is also still behind. But this wavering demand is a good indication that the recovery is closer than ever for this region, right? It's right around the corner. And when we look at the time booking horizons, we're also seeing very easy-to-determine differences there. We're seeing that in 2019, +90 days was the predominant travel booking windows that travelers were looking into, and currently it's more shorter term, 7 to 29 days or less than a week. The good news is that in the past 3 weeks we've noticed a shift, and the +90 days is becoming more prominent as travelers become— they become more open to traveling and planning ahead for that. Now let's focus on Brazil. And since we are here today, and this is such a fast-paced recovery market, I thought it would be interesting to look into some insights for this country in particular. The booking horizons are looking quite similar to the regional ones. We are seeing that plus 90 days was a prominent segment for 2019, and now users are looking more into 7 to 29-day travel and even less than a week travel. But in the past few weeks, we've also seen a shift to 30 to 59-day segments, as well as plus 90-day segments. And it's, it's a sign that Brazilians are starting to book ahead and ahead of high season as well. But you're probably wondering, where are Brazilian travelers looking to go? And it's actually, when we look at Brazil to LATAM, there are some weeks where we see the demand reaching the same levels as 2019 for Q4 of this year and Q1 of next year. But it's still 20% to 25% below the levels of demand that we used to see. The picture is very different when we look at Europe, because in Europe, we are seeing that recovery is reaching 2019 levels and surpassing it. And it's been happening in Q4 and in Q1 of this year. And the increase in interest from Brazilians traveling to Europe is probably related to macroeconomic changes. The euro has been declining in value versus the BRL in recent months. And that just makes Europe cheaper for Brazilians to travel to. So if we're looking at where in Europe Brazilians are focusing on traveling to, probably won't come as a surprise that Portugal is at the top of that list. So Portugal has always been a popular destination for Brazilians, even pre-pandemic, and that still holds true. Some things never change. And we see that Spain, France, and Italy and the UK are close behind. The interesting thing here is also to notice that there is Switzerland, Ireland, and all— and smaller countries that are coming up in interest for Brazilians as well. And maybe some unserved opportunities are available there to fly to those countries. I wanted to thank you so much for your time today. I hope you found these insights interesting and useful. And if you want to learn more, you can just say hi to me or Mark, who's my director and is here today as well. Thank you so much.

Copyright policy: All transcripts on this site are the copyright of CAPA - Centre for Aviation. Our reproduction policy is as follows: you may quote up to 400 words of any transcript on the condition that you attribute the transcript to CAPA - Centre for Aviation and link to the original video page. All other use is prohibited. While we aim for 100% accuracy in the transcript, there may be some minor transcribing errors.