The graph tracking daily bookings by ForwardKeys illustrates perfectly how the world’s view of the gravity of the coronavirus came into focus. David Tarsh, who represents the tourism analytics company, says that lower than average bookings in the last half of January were the result of travel restrictions placed by the Chinese on its citizens. But it was the discovery on January 28 that even Europeans could contract COVID-19 that began the steady deterioration of confidence in air travel that culminated six weeks later with the United States banning flights from Europe. “The first big dip you see on February 1 correlates very closely with the first COVID-19 case in Italy,” he says. “All it took was a couple of cases and bookings completely died for Italy, but then there was no more bad news for a while. People thought they were isolate cases, bookings to Italy and Europe picked up again.”_x000D_
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Everything changed, however, over the weekend of February 21-22 when it emerged that 80 and then 160 Italians had tested positively for the virus. Bookings to Italy nosedived immediately, to the point that by February 24 more passengers were canceling flights to the country than were booking them. Bookings for European destinations headed south as well, but didn’t reach negative territory until 27th when the number of cases had exploded to 750. (Daily booking numbers track differences in the number of bookings made exactly a year ago.)_x000D_
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A long-time observer of the tourist sector, Tarsh described the impact even before the United States ban on an entire swath of industries, including high street retail, restaurants and airlines, as catastrophic. “There’s panic everywhere,” he said. “Events are being canceled, footfalls in city centers are way down, people aren’t spending in restaurants, staying in hotels or getting on planes. Especially in the aviation industry, the margins are absolutely wafer thin.” he tells the joke about how to make a small fortune in aviation. “Start with a large one. It’s true. It’s a very volatile business in which you have to fill your plane all the time to have a chance of making money.”_x000D_
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In normal times, explains Tarsh, ForwardKeys data is used by retailers to track not just where and when people are booking destinations too, but to track which destinations are showing up the most often in online searches. This allows them to plan where to concentrate their advertising or logistics resources, or even when to make sure they have, say, Japanese-speaking staff on duty in their New York city airport duty free jobs. But with air travel and tourism in free-fall territory, it’s hard to see how to leverage the data.
