Travelport’s US Borders Re-opening Travel Trend Data Story

Travelport’s global travel technology powers bookings for hundreds of thousands of travel suppliers, such as airlines, hotels, rail and car rental companies worldwide. Our Travelport+ platform serves as a travel retailing marketplace that connects travel sellers and buyers, and as such, Travelport’s unique data insights enable us to view and monitor traveler shopping and booking trends worldwide.

In late September 2021, US President Biden announced that the United States would soon re-open its borders so that fully vaccinated travellers from the U.K. and the EU would be allowed to enter the US starting in November. Following this significant announcement considering that trans-Atlantic travel had been so heavily restricted for nearly two years, the Travelport PR team quickly reached out to our internal data insights team to see what kind of impact that the US government’s announcement had on international travel searches and bookings to the U.S.

The results were astonishing.

In the 24 hours following each US government announcement, US-bound flight bookings from the U.K. for the 2021 Thanksgiving weekend increased by 1,600% and 2,200%!

We felt this insight should not only be shared with Travelport customers, but that this interesting, and compelling story about international travelers’ eagerness to visit friends and family in the U.S. offered a powerful message about the industry’s post-pandemic recovery for the entire travel, tourism and hospitality industry.

Some of the insights we conveyed:
• Flight bookings to destinations across the USA reached 70% of pre-pandemic levels. International travel accounted for 52%.
• US-bound flights from the U.K. were searched more than US-bound flights from all other European countries, combined
• The top five US destinations for Brits were Orlando, New York, Miami, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.