Christmas holidays on location or at home? 3 booking trends for Belgium and the Netherlands!
A second Christmas period with reinforced corona measures. What impact does this have on tourism in Belgium and the Netherlands? Are we still waiting massively for last-minute bookings? Will we see an increase in foreign tourists? 3 notable booking trends in 2021!
A busy Christmas season?
Are there more or fewer overnight stays booked for the Christmas period in 2021 than in 2019 (pre-Corona)?
Belgium
Looking at the graph, we see that in Belgium we are quite close to the curve of 2019. We have not quite reached the 2019 level (71%), but we can already see a nice increase compared to the crisis year 2020.
* Bookings completed before 9/12/21.
The Netherlands
In the Netherlands, too, we see a clear increase in the number of bookings for the Christmas period compared to last year (2020). However, the level in 2021 is still quite a bit below that of 2019: The Netherlands reaches 57% of the number of bookings in 2019 this year.
* Bookings completed before 9/12/21.
Why does the Netherlands score rather lower than Belgium this year in terms of the number of bookings compared to 2019?
The national corona measures certainly play a role in this. The difference in the number of bookings between the two countries becomes a lot bigger around mid-November. From that moment on, the Netherlands goes into semi-lockdown with a closing hour for the hospitality industry, Belgium not (yet).
Last-minute bookings?
Are we expecting many last-minute bookings for the coming Christmas period?
The corona measures in mid-November in the Netherlands caused a drop in the number of bookings this year (when we compare with 2019). In the Netherlands, we already see a decrease towards 60% (in comparison with 2019) around mid-November. In Belgium, too, we see in the same comparison a decrease towards 62% as of the end of November.
However, it is striking that at the end of the curve, the number of bookings rises again. In early December, we see a similar increase in the number of bookings in both Belgium and the Netherlands, which may indicate a larger number of upcoming last-minute bookings.
Local tourism?
Local tourism experienced an unprecedented peak in 2020. This year (2021), we see a clear decline - both in Belgium and in the Netherlands - although local tourism is still more popular than in 2019. Another notable turnaround is seen in foreign tourism. There, we see a sharp increase compared to 2020. In the Netherlands, international tourism has already reached the level of 2019. So this Christmas period, we can once again welcome more foreign tourists to Belgium and the Netherlands!
* For this article, anonymised data from Stardekk Software was used.
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