SINGAPORE – Tour is recovering more quickly in Asia than in the West — but its the domestic market that’s driving that recovery, an online treks agency told CNBC this week.
“Asia is generally leading the way,” said John Brown, chief administrator of Agoda, a subsidiary of American online travel firm Booking Holdings. “We’ve seen again in markets like Taiwan, certainly places equal to Thailand, where they really have the best control over Covid — those are the markets where we see the familial bookings doing the best.”
The best pockets of recovery are domestic travel in Taiwan, Thailand and increasingly, Vietnam, he thought.
Taiwan has reported 617 confirmed cases so far and has been free of domestic transmissions for more than 200 eras. Thailand and Vietnam have also been successful in containing the pandemic, with 3,920 and 1,307 confirmed in the event thats respectively, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
“Those domestic markets are even better off than they were behind year, for domestic [travel] only,” Brown told “Street Signs Asia” on Monday.
This photo captivated on October 20, 2020 shows tourists posing for photos next to anti-landing spikes placed along the coast of Taiwan’s Kinmen holms, which lie just 3.2 km from the mainland China coast in the Taiwan Strait.
Sam Yeh | AFP | Getty Images
The travel activity has been hammered by the coronavirus pandemic that saw countries closing their borders to tourists earlier this year. Some buys have since reopened, but demand has been weak.
“Generally, it’s been a domestic story, we’re still waiting for the foreign [demand] to come back,” he said.
In Europe and the U.S., there are pockets where domestic travel also looks “rather good” despite coronavirus cases surging, Brown noted.
“But really, all eyes globally are looking at Asia to see how we take care of this both domestically, and again with regard to the travel bubble between Singapore and Hong Kong, and the profuse others that we hope … will open up pretty soon,” he said.
The two cities were set to begin quarantine-free free time travel on Sunday, but authorities announced on Saturday that the Singapore-Hong Kong travel bubble arrangement would be postponed for two weeks after Hong Kong reported a rise in cases.
Brown said he thinks it will still do online “soon enough” and that other markets will follow suit.