Salaries for new jobs in travel increased by 0.32% to an average of £28,287 last year, according to C&M Travel Recruitment and C&M Executive Recruitment’s 2020 Travel Salary Index.
It is the sixth year in succession that wages for new travel roles have increased, although the 0.32% rise recorded in 2020 is down from 4.99% in 2019 and 3.16% in 2018.
Average salaries for new jobs in travel paying up to £40,000 also increased for the sixth year in succession this time by 3.69% to £25,863, which compares favourably with the 0.62% increase in 2019 albeit while being down on increases in excess of five percent from 2015 to 2018.
There was also a decrease in average salaries for roles paying £40,000 and above, down 2.6% in 2020 to £57,065, the first annual fall in executive-level wages since 2015.
New vacancies, meanwhile, fell 74.2% in 2020, and 93.4% between April and December 2020 specifically when compared with the same months in 2019.
Moreover, despite there being a large number of Covid-related redundancies, there was also a significant fall in the number of people searching for new travel jobs – new registrations fell 41.2% in 2020 as a whole, and are down 53.2% year-on-year since the start of the pandemic in Europe.
’Right direction’
"None of us have ever experienced a year like 2020, and hopefully none of us ever will again," said C&M director Barbara Kolosinska. "Recruitment activity plummeted to levels we couldn’t ever have imagined, and we sadly lost many companies along the way.
"However, we are now gradually seeing travel recruitment levels rise month by month, and 2021 has got off to an extremely encouraging start. January resulted in the highest number of new travel vacancies since the original lockdown in March 2020, and this month (February) is looking set to be even busier.
"We’ve learnt over the past year or so that we need to be very cautious when making any predictions or projections about the state of the travel industry in the coming months, but things certainly do appear to be moving in the right direction and becoming more positive by the month.
"Let’s hope that the vaccine rollout continues to be a success and that this momentum continues into the spring and summer."
