If you’re looking for the same old bad news, don’t look at leisure travel, which appears to be the key comeback story of 2022 and is creating the foundation for a good perspective for 2023.
According to Jeni Mundy, Senior Vice President, Merchant Sales and Acquiring at Visa Global, there is a “air of optimism” around leisure travel.
She said, “We can tell you that cross-border travel-related spend is 16 percentage points more than it was.” when comparing 2018 and 2019.
International arrivals in 2022 “are well on their way to reaching 850-900 million by the end of the year, accounting for 75-80 percent of the 2019 levels,” according to Visa’s Special Report: Global Travel Insight Q3-2022 published in November.
This was a welcome change from the inflation-induced consumer spending pullbacks that marked 2022.
Two months later, Mundy stated, “even if we haven’t fully recovered in terms of the amount of individuals traveling, we are already recovered from a spend viewpoint.”
“What we did notice is that leisure passengers are leading the way, so leisure is rebounding much more quickly than business,” said Mundy. Additionally, those leisure tourists were spending more at the shops in addition to more on travel and lodging.
She said there will be a big demand for travel experiences starting in 2022 that may extend into 2023 due to pent-up demand and the excitement of doing something that was prohibited for such a long time.
