The crisis has not stopped wanderlust European tourists. This is apparent from the results of online travel agency eDreams' latest study, "Travelling in times of crisis: Travel trends in Europe in the current economic situation".
The study was launched to find out how travel habits have changed over the past four years. Results show buying in advance, taking advantage of offers and discounts, and saving on restaurants and shopping at the destination are the most common ways tourists cut back to avoid giving up their holidays.
The study carried out by eDreams reinforces the data in reports representative of the tourism industry: Europeans like to travel. During 2012 alone, eDreams clients travelled in total more than 17,000 hours in which they came to go around the Earth’s circumference more than 400,000 times and more than 40,000 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon. Co-founder and Marketing Director of eDreams,
Mauricio Prieto, states that "the online channel has democratized the travel industry, and is responsible for the phenomena we see in this study: it offers more freedom when searching for destinations and allows more transparent buying without intermediaries, advantages that have caused 50% of trips to be booked online."
The World Tourism Organization also highlights the online tourism boom, a trend that, according to Travel Weekly, has caused the sale of airline tickets and dynamic packages (flight + hotel packages) to increase significantly over the last five years.
The eDreams study included more than 2,500 participants from Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, the UK, and Germany that have acknowledged that their spending habits have changed since the start of the crisis. These changes are noticed even before the holidays: most said they prefer to spend less on clothes (25%) and technological devices (21%) throughout the year to be able to travel.
EU-Digest
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