Shaun Morton told Abta Travel Matters delegates on Tuesday (9 June): “Despite the environment we're in, [the travel industry] is likely to experience another year of growth. I think most people are still planning to travel at least as much as we did last year. And I can see this in our own business.”
Morton added that while geopolitical events cause immediate, dramatic friction, the travel industry relies on established cycles to bounce back rapidly.
“The industry and the consumer has always demonstrated resilience and desire to travel with every shock,” he said.
“There is an immediate need which the industry tackles, followed by a period of adjustment and evolution. The shock like we saw when the US invaded Iran is often tackled in days or weeks.
“The adjustment that follows creates a new normal and that happens quite quickly, often within weeks or months.
Morton continued: “We exist because people want to travel and not much gets in their way. Travel is the most protected non-essential spend category.
“People may delay booking their holiday or trade down to something cheaper, but they generally won't miss out on taking that hard earned break.”
Citing On the Beach’s own results, Morton told TTG: “There’s more flying. Flights to leisure destinations in Europe that are planned and scheduled are between 3-5% up.
“I can’t see a whole host of that being cancelled, so I think price activity is going to be used to stimulate it so you’re going to need a big curtailment of flights for us not to have a growth year.
“In terms of revenue it might not be growth for everyone, but in terms of people getting on planes I think it will be.
“The lates market is quite interesting because if we’ve got this delayed booking and then the war putting the brakes on even harder, the unwind of that could be quite interesting.
“So we might actually see that loop reverse quite quickly if the demand starts to come in and people starts to see it’s getting expensive or we can’t get what we want.”
Morton added: “It’s unbelievable the amount of people we have booking to go on holiday this week.
“If you want to go away as a big family or group this week it’ll be hard to get the seats. So I maybe the behaviour will start reversing.
“Every month so far, we’ve grown. People are still going away.”
Morton told delegates internal booking data showed that customers have compressed their booking windows by 10% over the last two years due to low future confidence.
