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SINGAPORE, July 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — As consumers around the world plan a summer of ‘revenge travel’ in the wake of easing restrictions, Trip.com data reflects the global travel recovery trend. Trip.com analysed data from their booking sites across Europe and Asia and the results show that users are more confident to book further ahead this summer, and the appetite for city breaks, staycations and short-haul trips still holds firm in a post-pandemic world.
For more in-depth analysis on the European and Asian markets, read on.
Wednesday is the most popular day to plan a trip
For summer 2022, midweek is the most popular time to plan a holiday. Trip.com data shows that, among their users, Tuesday through Thursday are the peak days for browsing flights and hotels. Wednesday is the most popular day overall for flight searches, with Saturday being the quietest.
Deciding when to take a holiday over the summer is often a tricky task for consumers, with price fluctuations, school holidays and, in Europe, the threat of cancelled flights and strikes to consider.
When looking at the summer period (June-September) across many of Trip.com’s major global markets (UK, South Korea, Japan and Thailand), 1 July was the most popular day for flight departures. It was also the most popular hotel check-in date that users searched for on Trip.com’s sites in the UK and Thailand.
With more popular dates expected across July, August and September, Trip.com looks forward to reviewing this data in the coming weeks and months.
Hotel booking window extended by up to a week
As Covid-19 began to affect travel in 2020, uncertainty and travel restrictions spread across the industry, customers – as expected – adapted their booking habits and moved to last-minute reservations.
Trip.com data shows that by June 2020, the booking window for hotel stays had fallen from 20.3 days (June 2019 data) to 6.1 days in Asia – highlighting the rising appetite for last-minute breaks. Flights saw a similar trend, with the booking window on Trip.com’s European sites falling to 13.4 days in June 2021 – from close to double that – 22.2 – just two years prior.
However, this summer, Trip.com’s data signals a return to pre-pandemic trends, with booking windows once again rising. In Europe, the window for hotel reservations in June 2022 matches the level seen in 2019 – 14.2 days; booking windows for flights extended to 14.2 days from 6.4 days of June 2021. Similar trends are evident across Asia, with booking windows for flights rising to 16.4 days in June 2022 from 6.1 days in June 2020.
This interesting finding has reflected the returning confidence of travellers to make their travel decisions earlier than when the pandemic had just started. However, it is important to note that booking windows still remain shorter than pre-pandemic in the region, as restrictions remain across many nations and districts.
Europe: city-centric summer holidays are high on the agenda
Airlines and hotel chains have reported bookings and occupancy levels rising to pre-pandemic numbers for the first time this spring, so there is plenty of cause for celebration across the travel sector.
Trip.com’s European data echoes this uplift in demand. Its European sites saw an average monthly growth in traffic of around 10% between April and July, further underlining the increased demand for summer getaways.
Interestingly, where many travellers are opting for beach holidays over city breaks this year, the data shows that city-centric summer holidays are still high on the agenda for Europeans, with must-visit sites, culture, food and new experiences tempting customers to take trips to some of Europe’s most enticing cities.
Trip.com’s European data also reflects the vast increase in short-haul travel demand for 1 June – 31 August 2022 versus the same period in 2021. This year, although European long-haul demand is also up incredibly, short-haul trips are 27 times more popular than long haul. This proves that when it comes to summer getaways, most travellers still appear to prefer to stay closer to home when they go away.
Customers book longer trips post-pandemic
With many consumers looking to book more lavish summer holidays after two years of pent-up demand, when it comes to trip length, the figures reveal some surprising insights. Interestingly, European customers travelled for longer during 2020 than they did previously, with the average trip length in June 2019 being 6.2 days, rising to 8.8 in 2020 and back down to 6.6 in June 2022.
Asian travellers, on the other hand, are travelling for an average of 7.6 days in 2022, an increase on the average of 6.6 days in June 2019 – but a decrease on 2021’s average of 8.7 days.
Local travel rebounds well in Asia
In Asia, countries and regions that have relaxed their travel restrictions have seen an impressive market performance, particularly those in southeast Asia. Overall in the APAC region, bookings increased by 21% in May and by a further 7.8% in June.
As the most popular destination among APAC users, it’s no surprise that Singapore’s hotel bookings saw a 42% year-on-year increase in June.
Thailand’s continued popularity is a pleasant surprise. The summer months tend to be the country’s low season, yet despite a slight dip in April following the Songkran Festival, bookings continue to grow throughout the season. Overall bookings have tripled when compared to June 2021, with a 17% rise in bookings compared with May this year.
Though Thailand continues to attract customers from the UK and APAC, the country’s recovery has mainly been driven by domestic travel, with domestic flights in June increasing 2.6 times year-on-year.
Japan and South Korea saw sharp growth in Q2, with South Korean outbound flights increasing by 16 times year on year and June outbound flight bookings up 31% compared to May. South Korea eased travel restrictions in early June, so expect this upward trajectory in bookings to continue.
Japan also eased its border restrictions in June, with a large spike in bookings following the news. In May, flight searches to Japan on Trip.com’s global sites were 7.5 times as popular when compared to the same period in 2021.
Summary
This summer, as travel recovery gains momentum, travellers’ confidence to book their trips further ahead have gradually returned, while short-haul travel remains the global holiday king. Despite the enduring summer holiday beach travel trend, city breaks continue to attract customers from around the world. As airport strikes and travel chaos in Europe continues to impact customers’ ability to get away, Trip.com plans to further analyse the sector at the end of this popular travel period. Watch this space.
About Trip.com
Trip.com is a rapidly growing international one-stop travel service provider, available in 24 languages across 39 countries and regions. Trip.com has an extensive hotel and flight network consisting of more than 1.2 million hotels in 200 countries and regions and over 2 million individual flight routes connecting more than 5,000 cities around the globe. Trip.com’s world-class 24/7 English language customer service as well as additional centres in Edinburgh, Tokyo and Seoul, help to ‘create the best travel experience’ for its millions of customers worldwide.
MSME can offer user-centric hyper-personalized recommendation service
SEOUL, South Korea, July 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — According to Korea IT Times, Harex InfoTech, Inc. announced on the 10th that they attended the “2022 Spring Conference of Korea Management Information Society ” held at Hanwha Resort Haeundae Tivoli in Busan from June 9 to 11 and announce the results of a “new B2B service using a user-centrichyper-personalized recommendation system” conducted with a research team led by Professor Kyoung Jun Lee from Kyung Hee University (Department of Big Data Application).
Professor Kyoung Jun Lee’s research team (Professor YuJeongHwangbo, researcher Baek Jeong, Soohyun Kim, and Gunho Lee) and Harex InfoTech’s User-CentricArtificial Intelligence Research Institute (Manager Youngjae Cho, Vice President Moonho Yang) proposed new B2B target marketing service and new product brainstorming using their own developed user-centric hyper-personalized recommendation system. The recommendation system is usually used in a B2C service that recommends products to users, but Harex InfoTech’s recommendation system is a B2B service methodology that can be used in stores.
The research team utilizes a list of recommended products derived as a user-centrichyper-personalized recommendation system for the target marketing. The methodology is to make user lists by products after cross-linkingthe lists of the recommended products for each user by product, and finally, target marketing the listed users by products. This technology is currently under patent-pending.
For example, if ‘Company B’s Fried Chicken’ is derived as a recommended value based on user A’s purchase history, then company B can conducttarget marketinga fried chicken on user A. Existing target marketing was mainly conducted in groups based on demographic information such as women in their 20s and men in their 50s, but the research team’s recommendation system allows hyper-personalized target marketing based on duality (pair or confrontational relationships).
For brainstorming of new product, the research team uses a user-centrichyper-personalized recommendation system that utilizes the product name in natural language. Since the AI learns by morpheme unit (separating ‘Ham cheese toast’ into ‘ham/cheese/toast’), which is the minimum unit of the product’s name meaning, it is possible to derive a product name that does not actually exist. Derived products that do not exist in reality may rather be more suitable for users. It is under patent to use this idea for the development of new products.
It is unique that this methodology uses morpheme units to study. For example, if a user purchased ‘Chicken Breast Cream Spaghetti’, ‘Octopus Bibimbap’, ‘Stir-fried Spicy Pork’, and ‘Ham Cheese Toast’, they would learn it in the form of ‘Chicken Breast’, ‘Cream’, ‘Spaghetti’, ‘Octopus’, ‘Bibimbap’, ‘Stir-fried Pork’, ‘Rice’, ‘Ham Cheese’, and ‘Toast’. The derived value is also combined in morpheme units. Non-existing product names such as “Octopus Cream Spaghetti” and “Spicy Pork Toast” can be derived. The new product name derived in this way can be presented as a brainstorming idea for the development of new products.
Previous recommendation system research was used as a single service task called recommendation model, but Professor Lee’s research team, through one recommendation system, utilize it as a multi-service task such as B2B service-based target marketing and new product development brainstorming as well as hyper-personalized B2C recommendation service.
Researcher Baek Jung said, “The large language model GPT-3 released by OpenAI has become the one service engine to utilize various application services such as Q&A, grammar correction, and chatbot, etc.” and “We will develop various service tasks by utilizing the user-centric hyper-personalized recommendation system that has been developed as an AI engine and makeit to be used in the general commercial environment.”
Professor Kyoung Jun Lee, who leads Harex Infotech’s User-centricArtificial Intelligence Research Institute, presented under the theme of “Artificial Intelligence Sharing Platform as an Alternative to Exclusive Platforms” at the 2022 Spring Conference of Korea Management Information Systems. An artificial intelligence sharing platform based on User-CentricArtificial Intelligence is one of the alternatives against exclusive platforms from big tech or large companies.
Companies such as Big Tech monopolize data secured by customers, small business owners, individual businesses, and small and medium-sized enterprises. Professor Lee uses newly developed federated learning technology to pursue synergy in which customers and small and medium-sized businesses share artificial intelligence while keeping their data intact. Based on shared artificial intelligence, it presents a federated platform business model that provides and shares various services such as recommendation, target marketing, new product planning, and payment services.
Conventional federated learning is a form of sharing AI by creating a single model through individual companies’ data, but the newly proposed federated learning method divides data from individual companies and creates a final AI sharing model. The new federated learning methodology has been patented
Professor Kyoung Jun Lee said, “The largest AI engine at each industry and level, including medical, commerce, transportation, finance, smart farms, manufacturing, robots, and smart cities, will be built by AI sharing methods,” and “If we introduce this method, we can use each other’s data without signing a data agreement between economic players, so we will make it possible of new cooperation and business models that were previously impossible between individuals, companies, and institutions.”
Kyung Yang Park, Founder, President and Chief Vision Officer of Harex InfoTech Inc. said, “In the beginning, the business will start with a small size of AI sharing between several companies, but it will expand gradually,” adding, “It will be an opportunity to change the business model and collaboration method completely, and furthermore, this system will be established as a sustainable way of business in the era of stakeholder capitalism.”
Harex InfoTech announced the world’s first mobile card payment service in Silicon Valley in 2000 and 2013 won the ‘Best Technology Award’ at the Innovation Project 2013 held by PYMNTS.com at Annenberg Hall on the Harvard University Campus, and is building the User-Centric Hyper-Connected Shared Network by sharing the platform with all businesses and based on the network created, is creating a user-centric new economic order that maximizes user benefits and business profits with hyper-personalized Digital Me services based on User-Centric AI sharing platform.
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