TourRadar Wrapped 2023: Global Edition

As TourRadar heads to USTOA in Los Angeles this weekend to meet with dozens of our DMO partners, we’re pleased to unveil TourRadar Wrapped 2023 – a package of globe-spanning statistics from our organized adventures ecosystem, bundled up and delivered as trends that we think your destination should keep an eye on as we head into 2024.

We know the organized adventures industry better than most. For those who might not be familiar with us, think of TourRadar as the Expedia or Booking.com of the multi-day touring space. Our marketplace boasts over 50,000 active itineraries that travel through over 160 countries, and our inventory continues to grow. We partner with the world’s most established operators (like Intrepid, Globus, and G Adventures, not to mention over 2,600 locally-run tour companies), and using our award-winning website, we boast live availability, end-to-end booking functionality, and best-in-class customer service for our travelers. 

Our platform gives us massive amounts of search and booking data, and with it, a unique lens into what trends are shaping the future for our travelers, operators, and destinations. Whether you call us an aggregator (or an “Amazon for adventures”), our marketplace sits at the epicenter of the multi-day touring industry.

TourRadar Wrapped 2023: Global Edition sorts our data points and trends into Two Big Storylines that we see shaping the direction of the organized adventures industry, and that our DMO partners should keep a close eye on in 2024. (A big thank you to TourRadar’s data guru Lia Costa for the assist here, and to Juan A. Gomez from the travel analytics firm ForwardKeys.)

We've also put together a unique TourRadar Wrapped 2023 report for every destination that is sold on our marketplace, with your own data points, trends, and storylines. If you’d like to receive yours, please hit 'Reply' and let us know! 

So without further ado, grab a coffee, put your feet up, and get comfortable – let’s get to those storylines.

The First Big Storyline:

The organized adventures industry expects to fully recover to 2019 passenger levels by the end of 2023, but this recovery will be asymmetrical.

It’s been a long road, but if our booking data is any indication, we are tantalizingly close to seeing our global passenger numbers return to the ‘normal’ of 2019.

This goes without saying, but any metric that puts the pandemic further into the rearview is one that’ll make us smile. If we double-click into the metadata by source market, however, it's clear that each continent tells its own unique recovery story.

Let’s start with Asia/Pacific. As we’re all aware, it opened late as an outbound region, and has grown relatively slowly since the pandemic. But we believe it’s poised to have a breakout year in 2024. As of October 2023, Australia has recovered 70% of its pre-pandemic traffic levels, and China isn’t far behind, recently surpassing 50% of its 2019 levels. Japan and South Korea are still lagging behind, however, at just 30 to 35% of their 2019 outbound volume. We'll continue to keep a close eye on those markets.

Next, let’s consider Europe. While it remains the largest outbound continent globally, each country has traced its own unique trajectory. We saw Spain and Italy recover to 2019 traveller numbers this past summer, while large markets like Germany and the UK continue to lag behind. Will Brits and Germans continue to stay home in 2024?

The Americas are still being driven by the astonishingly resilient outbound traffic from the United States, but large Latin American markets have come back online in 2023 and are poised for a big 2024. Can Americans continue to travel at the levels we've seen since 2021, or will we look back on 2023 as the peak of a fading revenge travel boom? 

Finally, Africa & the Middle East have emerged as a major outbound market, delivering more international travelers today than in 2019. Notably, it's the Gulf States that are driving this recovery, with their strong economies and well-connected hubs. Destinations looking to capture new leisure markets in 2024 are wise to shift their focus to travelers in this region.

Outbound markets aren’t the only asymmetrical recovery story, though – leisure travelers are selecting destinations differently in 2023 than they were in 2019. To better understand this inbound story, let’s peek at some of the TourRadar trends data on behalf of our 2,600 multi-day tour operators.

Our big growth story here is Africa, which is attracting North American and European visitors in record numbers.

Within the African continent, the biggest winner this year is Egypt, which saw its organized adventure bookings grow 87% across our operators since 2019, and is TourRadar’s second most popular global destination in 2023. (Behind Italy and ahead of Japan, in case you were curious.) There’s also been a huge appetite for safaris in Africa, as represented by the large jumps seen from Tanzania and Kenya since 2019.

We’ve also seen big growth this past year in passengers heading to Asia, with our organized adventure departures to the continent now surpassing 2019 numbers (though just barely). While Vietnam and Sri Lanka are hot, two destinations in particular are driving this growth story: Japan and South Korea.

Adventures into Europe are still down compared to 2019, unfortunately, but there are a number of individual countries that have seen significant growth over their pre-pandemic sales. 

While Portugal, Albania and Slovenia lead the way, it's also interesting to see Nordic countries like Norway and Finland growing in popularity. We’ve seen some data that suggests that climate change could be a contributing factor. With heat waves and wildfires raging across the continent this past July, August saw Southern Europe lose 3% market share in last-minute flight searches to Northern Europe. 

Leisure travelers are resilient, and may see things on the news that change their desired destination… but not necessarily their decision to leave home. Just as often as we’ve seen preferences for where evolve, so too have we seen an impact on when. Interestingly, the most popular departure months across the entire organized adventure industry in 2023 were September and October. In 2019, these two months were outperformed by June, July and August in terms of departure volume – perhaps a response to hotter weather, or a pivot to more attractive rates during the fall rather than in the height of European summer. 

When it comes to outbound source markets and inbound destinations, one thing is certain for 2024 – recovery and growth won’t happen in a uniform way. This asymmetry, and the accompanying challenges around predicting who’ll be next to surge (or lag), will continue to shift priorities for our operators in the coming year. Expect it to impact the ways they engage with your destinations. 

The Second Big Storyline:

Travelers are consistently spending more on their organized adventure itineraries than they were before the pandemic. 

Leisure travel has changed in the last five years, and the 2023 search and booking data is not only instructive about what types of adventures our travelers prefer, but how they prefer to make plans as we head into 2024. 

Regardless of source market or destination, our multi-day adventure operators are seeing travelers take longer trips to more locales than before the pandemic, and these trips are being planned further in advance. Travelers are also bringing more friends and family along with them. Taken together, these three changes are driving up spends on itineraries.

Let’s start by comparing global basket sizes per traveler on TourRadar between 2019 and 2023.

The percentage of trips that cost less than €1,500 per pax has decreased, while our most expensive basket sizes have seen twice the number of bookings in 2023 than in 2019. From a flight perspective, FowardKeys has identified that some of this increase could be coming from the greater share of trips being taken post-pandemic by wealthier travelers.

In organized adventure itineraries, an increase in the share of affluent travelers tends to be reflected by a preference for luxury rather than premium accommodation, which drives the per-traveler cost up. Operators have already responded to this shift by providing a larger variety of higher-end hotel options in many destinations.

While you may be tempted to blame inflation here, we don't believe that accounts for most of the increases we're seeing. Nor is this another flight prices story, as these increases apply to TourRadar itineraries that exclude flights.

The more impactful explanation: we've seen travelers prioritize lengthier trips away from home in 2023. While we see this trend playing out globally, let’s use the European source market as our example here.

For a DMO, this is an enticing opportunity. You could capitalize on this appetite for longer journeys by highlighting further afield corners of your destination that might be ignored during shorter stays.

This would help convince travelers that the best use of their longer adventure is a deeper, more immersive journey in your destination, rather than the addition of a separate destination – another trend that’s become increasingly popular in 2023. We see this growth in multi-country trips on TourRadar, and its reflected in our ForwardKeys flight data.

We’ve listed a few reasons why the spend per traveler has increased in 2023, so now let’s consider the reasons we’ve also seen an increase in spend per booking.

Our biggest 2023 mystery: where have the solo travelers gone? While this key demographic contributed a full 50% of travelers to our multi-day operators in 2019, that group’s share has fallen by 10% in the last four years. That is a significant drop.

For destination marketers, this trend presents another opportunity – a better return on campaign spends. As a prospective traveler moves through the purchase funnel from awareness to conversion, you stand to bring back two or three times the revenue you would have if that individual had chosen to visit your destination alone. That’s good news. 

But to capture this traveler for your destination, it’s important to understand how they differ from solo travelers. For one, couples and groups tend to plan their trips further out than (the more impulsive) solo travelers do, and so as we’ve seen groups rise, we’ve also seen trips booked further in advance in 2023 than in 2019.

The elongation of booking windows can have a knock-on effect for how you time your destination marketing efforts, as you may reap a better ROI if you kick off a campaign a month or two earlier than you typically would have in years past.

To this end, we’d recommend that you read through your own destination’s TourRadar Wrapped 2023 so you can identify target source markets and compare top booking months, top travel months, your relative booking windows, passenger spends, passenger numbers, bed nights, and average trip lengths between 2019 and 2023. We're happy to help – just drop us a line!

From a global perspective, that’s a wrap from us in 2023.

We hope you’ve picked up a useful insight or two here that might help your planning for next year. Let us know if TourRadar’s data, trendlines, or insights can assist – you never know which storylines might be critical to helping you drive growth in the organized adventures space in 2024!

Also Wrapped: Adventure Together 2023

We also want to extend a huge thank you to all of the destination representatives who attended Adventure Together last month. This year's conference in Vienna was our biggest yet, with thousands of North American travel agents in attendance along with countless leaders from the 2,600+ tour operators that sell via TourRadar's marketplace. 

We hosted keynotes and panel discussions on a wide range of topics that impact the multi-day organized adventures industry, with one notable gap – we didn’t hear from DMOs over the two-day event. This is on us. 

We plan to rectify it next fall at Adventure Together 2024, providing a bigger, noisier platform for destinations to have their voices heard by operators and agents.

If you’d be keen to take the stage next year to amplify your message, hit 'Reply' and let us know!

Finally, for those of you flying to USTOA this weekend, have a safe flight out to Los Angeles. We look forward to seeing you at the show!