Perspectives on travel recovery: Germany

The German tourism market dropped by nearly 38% between 2019 and 2020, and it is not expected to return to its pre-crisis level until 2023 (earlier than other European countries such as UK, Italy, France or Spain, than will do so around 2024). Around 1 million direct jobs have been affected.

Domestic expenditures have been the most resilient compared to other European countries, even though they has declined by 33% due to the less rigid COVID-19 travel restrictions. Both the business and leisure segment should recover fast comparing to the European average of recovery and return to its pre-crisis level in 2022 (faster than Spain, France, Italy or UK).

Outbound expenditures dropped significantly by 71% between 2019 and 2020. We do no anticipate both business and leisure outbound travel from Germany to recover to pre-crisis levels until 2024. For Germany, the inbound business segment looks to be the slowest to recover and won’t do so until 2026.

In terms of outbound spend, Germany occupies the first position in Europe (40 value in USD bn) and the second position in terms of average trip expenditure for international trips (1481 value in USD bn) only behind Finland.

German domestic tourism market is likely to recover in 2022, while inbound tourism will recover later in 2024.