SCOTTSDALE, DALLAS and LONDON (April 14, 2011) – Pegasus Solutions has issued a special edition of The Pegasus View addressing the impact of the Japan and New Zealand earthquakes, as well as political unrest in the Middle East and North Africa on the global travel industry. The report details changes in historic and forward-looking bookings, average daily rate (ADR), length of stay (LOS) and revenue for ASPAC and EMEA hotels geographically affected by the natural disasters and political protests.
The report opens with data from the Middle East and North Africa, where reservations for the region overall dropped off from steady +40% increases for the three months leading into widespread protests to a smaller +16.4% increase in February. Rates and LOS also dropped immediately, and forward-looking data demonstrated significant declines in reservations, ADR, LOS and revenue. Net bookings as of February for stays through August declined by -85%, and rates reduced by as much as -37.2% through the same period. Analysis also extends to key travel markets affected, including Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Israel.
Japan’s booking data demonstrates the most drastic changes with net reservation volumes that declined from an increase over 2010 of +26.1% on March 10 to a triple digit decrease on March 11 when the 9.0-magnitude Tōhoku earthquake and the ensuing tsunami hit. In the days following, this decrease was accompanied by triple-digit drops in net revenue and radical fluctuations in LOS, which swung by more than 1000 percentage points between March 11 and March 19. Average LOS spiked to +551.9% greater than prior year for the day of the disaster, plummeting to -521.0% less than prior year eight days later. Analysis of the Japan earthquake also includes data from Hawaii, which experienced an immediate drop in bookings from +67.4% over 2010 on March 10th to a -23.8% drop on March 12th.
“We anxiously watched to find out how our hotel customers were affected by these historic events, as we did last year while waiting for the volcanic ash from Eyjafjallajokull to settle,” said Mike Kistner, chief executive officer of Pegasus Solutions. “This special report of The Pegasus View gives us a more complete picture of what happened immediately leading up to and after these events, as well as what the business on the books shows for the coming months in both ASPAC and EMEA.”
Data for New Zealand, which experienced a 6.3-magnitude quake on Feb. 22, shows a dramatic drop in net bookings that day by -80% below that for 2010. Length of stay increased as high as +82.8% the day of the quake as travelers could not easily depart due to safety concerns and infrastructure damage, but returned to pre-quake levels within weeks. Helping buffer the downward influence on revenue, total ADR for New Zealand remained higher than last year. Dropping sporadically below prior year levels, ADR frequently registered double-digit increases over 2010 during the weeks following the earthquake.
The Special Edition of The Pegasus View is available in its entirety online and by free subscription at www.pegs.com. Data reported in The Pegasus View comes from billions of transactions processed monthly by Pegasus Solutions, the world’s single largest global processor of hotel transactions. It is the only industry report to reflect data drawn from both GDS (global distribution systems) and ADS (alternative distribution systems) transactions, representing the business and leisure markets respectively for approximately 90,000 hotels worldwide.
