The travel and tourism sector in the Middle East could take years to recover to pre-crisis levels according to research by Euromonitor International.
Caroline Bremner, global travel and tourism manager at Euromonitor International told Arabian Travel News that certain segments of the industry would bounce back from the impact of the financial crisis quicker than others.
Air travel secor is expected to see recovery the quickest - within a period two years, while tourism expenditure will not recover to pre-crisis levels until 2011.
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“For tourism expenditure, which means incoming and outgoing expenditure, and travel retail - so sales through travel agents and tour operators - we are expecting to take slightly longer at three years. So recovery to pre-crisis levels at 2011,” predicted Bremner.
For the hotel sector the road to recovery is a long one. “The hotel industry will take a longer time to recover because it is a lag industry and it does take a longer time to catch up,” said Bremner. “It takes a while once you start discounting to build up those rates again so it’s not going to be a quick fix overnight in terms of getting back to those pre-crisis levels.”
Bremner predicted that the hotel industry would be back to 2008 levels by 2012.
While this may seem a long way off, Bremner pointed out that the Middle East is not doing too badly compared to the rest of the world.
“In the scheme of things that really isn’t too bad. Globally, Asia is going to recover in terms of hotels the fastest in say two or three years and then the rest of the regions could take several years if not more to recover. So in the scheme of things four years does sound a long time but compared to other regions its actually pretty good.”
“But it’s all in terms of context – obviously for the operators in the region to wait four years to return to this level it is very difficult.”
Caroline Bremner will be unveiling more details from the 'Euromonitor Middle East Travel Trend Report' at Arabian Travel Market on 4 May.
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