Holiday bookings for 2024: Austrians are much earlier this year

“We currently have around 25 percent more advance bookings,” said WKÖ travel agency spokesman Gregor Kadanka. That was roughly at the pre-Corona level. Capacity utilization and prices increased significantly last year. “This will slow down somewhat when capacities grow again.”

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Flight offerings are bigger again

The flight offering is larger again this year, but still below that of 2019. In 2024, the global number of seats available on planes will reach just over 90 percent of the pre-Corona capacity, compared to around 80 percent in the previous year. In addition, the 10 percent annual growth that is usual in normal years was also missing during the pandemic years. Therefore, “the delta is actually even bigger,” said the chairman of the association of domestic travel agencies in the Austrian Chamber of Commerce.

Last year, prices rose sharply – around 20 to 30 percent worldwide, according to Kadanka’s rough estimate. However, it is difficult to give an average. Flights from European hubs such as Frankfurt have become twice as expensive; certain routes have become “extremely more expensive”, others not at all. “The ‘spread’ has become enormous – other flights are sometimes cheap and around the corner to Zurich you pay 1,000 euros.” Vienna-Amsterdam also costs significantly more, while Vienna-Palma has not become more expensive. The reason is the different competitive situation.

No major shifts in destinations

Before Corona, a large proportion of annual vacations had already been fixed between November and January. After three Corona winters, customers were still cautious in these otherwise strong booking months last year. According to Kadanka, they only started booking their trips for 2023 from the end of January to March: “There was a strong upswing.” Given the still limited capacity, some of them no longer got what they wanted.

There will be “no major shifts” in the chosen destinations in 2024. The Mediterranean is well booked in the summer – “Turkey is a little stronger again”. In winter, the Indian Ocean with Mauritius, the Maldives and the Seychelles, Africa with Tanzania, Namibia, Morocco and also safari are popular topics, as are the USA and Asia, especially Thailand. “Thailand is coming back – they had relatively long and tough corona restrictions there,” said the industry spokesman.

• More on the topic: Where Austrians prefer to vacation (OÖNplus)

Travel providers are threatened with trouble on the EU bureaucracy front

While bookings have gotten off to a great start, travel providers are threatened with trouble on the EU bureaucracy front, specifically with the draft for the revision of the package travel directive from 2015, which has been in the drawers of the EU Commission in Brussels since November and has not yet been passed is the parliament. The planned reform of travel law is causing discontent and excitement in the industry: The aim is for travel agencies to become tour operators – with the corresponding tour operator liability – as soon as customers book “several individual services such as flights and hotels within three hours”. “When a travel agency puts two individual services together, it becomes a tour operator,” says Kadanka. If individual services are combined individually according to customer requirements, the entire organizer risk falls on the provider. This liability would be in addition to insolvency protection.

According to the EU draft, there will no longer be the so-called “connected travel service” in travel agencies, i.e. the currently possible combination of various individual services, which, according to Kadanka, is accompanied by insolvency protection and advice and which was only included in the package travel directive in 2015. “The customer has no advantage from the new regulation,” said the industry spokesman.

“This is the Wild West”

Rather, customers are being forced to only be able to book a package holiday through a travel agency. Since consumers have become even more price-conscious due to the economic environment, many would then travel without the protection of a package holiday for cost reasons, the industry spokesman suspects. “It’s the Wild West,” said Kadanka, referring to the lack of legal protection on the Internet.

• More on this: The desire to travel continues despite inflation: This is how much Austrians spend on vacation

And if vacationers decide to use a travel agency to put together a trip that meets their individual wishes, it will definitely be more expensive than it is currently. The travel agency then has to pay a “risk premium” for the extension of liability. If the individual bookings are considered a package trip, the travel providers would incur higher insurance premiums due to the additional liability, explained Kadanka. The higher costs are ultimately passed on to the customer.

In any case, the proposed new regulation does no service to consumer protection, “if the customer is on his own when booking and has to send his money abroad and has a place of jurisdiction somewhere in the event of problems,” said the travel agency spokesman. “The EU had announced that it wanted to make things easier for companies and safer for consumers – both goals were diametrically missed,” said Kadanka.

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