The desire to travel and break the routine, evident after the pandemic lockdown and the first vacations with uncomfortable limitations and restrictions, is still alive, despite the erosion that inflation has inflicted on family budgets over the last year. There are consumption decisions whose revival was initially attributed to savings accumulated during the health crisis. And either for some that savings is still available, or the reasons were much less conjunctural and those days of travel already scheduled are already part of an essential budget that will only be waived in case of unavoidable constraints. Something that for many families (but surely for those who were already living on the limits of austerity) is already suffocating but that, with the employment data in hand, has not reached those who make up the potential domestic tourism market.
The fact that the omens about the devastating impact of the war in Ukraine, the increase in energy bills and the bank turbulence have been discarded, perhaps they have eliminated caution and prudence when planning vacations or deciding on other types of expenses. The forecasts for the sector and the available reservation and contracting data suggest that the increase in prices will not be a sufficient reason to withdraw travel plans in general and that we can live a week comparable to the moments before the covid-19 crisis. , something that the Spanish economy will appreciate.
In principle, it may be surprising that air tickets have hardly noticed the rise in prices (10% more but -1.1% on domestic flights and -9.7% on international flights compared to 2017) when On the other hand, the spending that travelers will make at their destination will have increases of 30% in hotels, 24% in the gasoline they refuel in their rental car, 25% in their beers or 17.8% in restaurants (always compared to 2017). The plane ticket, the first factor in a large part of vacation budgets, has remained at affordable levels that do not make it become an entry barrier in purchasing psychology when deciding on travel, especially when we are talking of short periods. Another thing is to what extent the expense that they will end up accumulating during the displaced can surprise at the end of the month. Even with a good Easter season, it cannot be taken for granted that these data can be directly extrapolated to the summer campaign, even more crucial for the country’s economy as a whole and before which it would be daring to make forecasts about how long point there will or will not be a moderation of relevant spending.
We depend on factors that we cannot control or anticipate: with Asian tourism still in quarantine due to the increase in the cost of flights from that continent due to the closure of Ukrainian airspace and the effects of sanctions against Russia and the recovery of the issuing markets of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States as the main asset for the optimistic tourism data for these weeks, there are too many macroeconomic factors that could affect them in the coming months.