Indian travellers appear to be the most last minute in the Asia Pacific region when it comes to booking flights, averaging just 10 days before their departure between March-July 2020.
They are followed by Thai and Singaporean travellers, who booked on average 21 and 25 days prior to departure.
This shorter booking lead times are mainly due uncertainties and changing travel restrictions imposed during the current pandemic, said Amadeus in its first Covid-19 Travel Insights bulletin, which tracked the effect on flight booking lead times in Asia Pacific region (APAC) since March this year.
Data revealed flight bookings across APAC have been made 17 days later on average during the pandemic, compared to the same period in 2018 and 2019. Overall, booking lead times for international and domestic flights combined have decreased during the pandemic across all 10 countries in APAC except for Malaysia where there has been no noticeable change.
India, Australia, Thailand and New Zealand have seen the most significant changes in traveller behaviour, with decreases of 68%, 54%, 53% and 51% respectively in flight booking lead times compared to pre-Covid-19 levels.
The booking window has even contracted by 14% in Japan, where booking lead times have remained the longest in the region at 53 days.
“This has significant ramifications for our industry as it looks to rebuild. For a start, airlines, hotels and tour operators now have a much shorter window of opportunity to engage travellers and urgently need to adapt their marketing and business strategies to cater to the nuances of the last-minute market more than ever before,” said Cyril Tetaz, executive vice president, airlines for Amadeus Asia Pacific.
He added that with so many last-minute bookings the use of historical data to predict demand and income are no longer effective now. “Travel businesses will need to increasingly rely on reliable real-time data instead, and build flexibility into every aspect of their day-to-day operations, so that resources, systems and services can be seamlessly scaled up and down as demand fluctuates at short notice, without having any impact on the traveller’s experience.”
Malaysia, the Philippines buck the trend in domestic travel
An interesting finding is Malaysia and the Philippines are departing from the shorter lead time trend when making arrangements for domestic travel.
Malaysian travellers, in particular, have been making domestic flight bookings much further ahead than they were typically doing pre-Covid. They are booking, on average, 51 days ahead of their departure date between March-July 2020, compared to the country’s average booking lead time of 28 days prior to the outbreak.
According to Amadeus’ anonymised data, the same is also true of Filipino travellers whose average booking lead time has increased by 22% for domestic flights during the pandemic.
Tetaz said this booking pattern on domestic flight routes “could, in part, reflect particularly strong concerns from Malaysian and Filipino travellers about the safety of travel and the security of domestic bookings. Whatever the reason, travel companies in these markets will clearly need to go the extra mile to lure back hesitant domestic travellers, which is going to be a critical part of every country’s recovery, especially in the short-term.”
• Featured image credit: Rawf8/Getty Images
