Almost three-quarters of people in the UAE and Saudi Arabia are ready to travel in the next six months, according to the latest Travel Insights Report from Dubai-based OTA platform Cleartrip.
However, those who responded to the survey revealed, not only would they be travelling for shorter periods, but also the distance to destinations would be much shorter.
Amit Taneja, chief commercial officer of Cleartrip, told Arabian Business the last 12-15 months had been “catastrophic” for the industry, but added: “The positive is that the intent to travel is there, the urge to travel is there. It’s not that people are saying that travel is the last thing on their mind.”
While 72 percent of respondents said they are keen to travel in the next six months, 16 percent said they were only comfortable doing so once they had been vaccinated.
Some 42 percent revealed that the duration of their next trip would be five days or less. “There’s a very clear bias towards shorter breaks,” said Taneja.
The survey, which was conducted with 5,678 respondents living in the UAE and Saudi, also showed that the top five bucket list destinations for travellers are the Maldives, Georgia, Turkey, Singapore and India, which aside from Singapore, indicates a willingness for people to take trips closer to home.
“The long haul destinations, like the Australias and the Americas, will probably take longer to recover,” said Taneja.
Over a third of respondents admitted that easy quarantine rules and affordability will be the popular combination this year when selecting a destination.
While there was heavy leaning towards beach holidays (46 percent) and adventure holidays (28 percent).
Amit Taneja, chief commercial officer of Cleartrip.
Taneja said: “Essentially what this means is that people want to be away from crowds. They want to have more ‘me time’, more time with their family. Part of this is that you want to spend quality time and you want to stay away from large, crowded places.”
Close to 65 percent of those taking part in the survey said confidence measures such as safe travel enablers and lower rates of Covid-19 cases, were among the key considerations when planning a trip.
Taneja said: “Even though people want to travel, there’s still an uncertainty there and it’s going to be there for some time. That means, what if something goes wrong when I’m at the destination? People have seen this, countries close the borders at very short notice. A lot of people have experienced that getting their cancellations and their refunds wasn’t a smooth process.
“The whole industry had to deal with an avalanche of cancellations at unprecedented levels. The net sufferer of that has been the consumer.
“Not only the health, safety and cleanliness is going to be important, but also how do you put your travellers at ease to make sure they have a great travel experience – in booking the travel, during the travel?”
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