Two months after the reopening of South Africa’s borders and two weeks since the scrapping of the ‘red list’ of countries, South African agents are reporting that some green shoots of recovery are emerging.
“If I look at ticketing stats for the Club Franchises, there were only about 700 tickets issued by our franchise partners in July. In August we saw this grow to around 1 500 tickets, 2 500 in September and 5 500 tickets in October. While these numbers are still low and around 80% are for domestic travel, the stats do paint a picture that things are on the up and up,” said Club Travel’s executive manager: franchise, Jo Fraser.
“In October 2020, Travel Counsellors South Africa invoiced 49% of our October 2019 sales and we are currently on 46% of our November 2019 figures, with a few days of the month still to go,” said gm of Travel Counsellors South Africa, Mladen Lukic. He said there had been a lot of pent-up demand that had resulted in a rush of emotional bookings in October and November but he expected demand to plateau during December due to the tightening of European regulations to combat the continent’s second wave of infections.
“It is wonderful to see South Africans rediscovering their country but in order to grow sales further, agents will need to start moving travellers internationally. Unfortunately, the destinations that are open at present are very limited. Many of our sales have been leisure bookings during this period, while corporates – which have traditionally accounted for the majority of our bookings – are still cautious about booking. As the bookings that are coming in are not routine transactions, we believe that our business model, which is based on a high level of personal contact, will show faster recovery than a highly transactional model,” said Mladen.
Flight Centre md MEA, Andrew Stark, told Travel News that FCTG had achieved 35% of its October 2019 sales in October 2020. He said this was a great improvement on the June and July figures, which reflected as negative sales due to all the refunds that FCTG was processing.
FCTG South Africa has paid back over R100m in refunds so far and estimates that it will pay out another R100m before the pandemic crisis ends. He was positive about the recovery achieved so far but mentioned that the majority of bookings were still domestic and that airline yields were down due to the ridiculously low airfares on offer at present.
Ceo of Asata, Otto de Vries, said Asata members were reporting that there was a lot of interest in travelling, some of which was converting into leisure sales but very little for corporate, which has traditionally accounted for the majority of Asata member sales. He said leisure travel traditionally offered lower margins than corporate travel, particularly for domestic bookings, which meant that there had been mixed recovery in the market.
“The good news is that there is still demand for international travel and particularly for destinations like Mauritius, Thailand and Europe. As regulations begin to ease internationally we will see more conversions of these bookings taking place,” said Otto.
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