Summer 2022 season will soon be upon us, and many destinations are preparing to soon open their doors to welcome tourists. But a big question remains. Will this year be any better for the hospitality and tourism industry, considering COVID-19 is still around than the previous two years?

The pandemic has had a significant impact on the industry and affected tourism professionals. Booking cancellations saw tourism businesses’ revenues plummet, while many were left unemployed.

Based on the current epidemiological data and bookings, what do experts say about the hospitality and tourism industry 2022 performance? Let’s find out.  

What experts initially believed

Since the beginning of the pandemic, tourism experts were not so optimistic about the sector’s recovery. Only 1% of tourism experts thought a recovery to pre-pandemic levels was possible in 2021. At the same time, 15% believed that the sector would recover in 2022. The majority (43%) sided with 2023, and 41% felt 2024 or later sounded more likely.

Hospitality and tourism industry statistics

Tourism arrivals went up by 4% in 2021 compared to 2020 levels, but they remained 72% below the pre-pandemic levels in 2019. This drop in tourist arrivals meant a $1.3 trillion loss in export revenue, to put this in numbers.

To illustrate this, in the following graph, you see that tourists spent fewer nights in tourist accommodation during the three summers months from June to August 2021.

In 2022, global international tourist arrivals more than doubled (+130%) in January 2022 compared to 2021. Particularly, this is an increase of 18 million more visitors worldwide in the first month of the year, which equals the total rise in visitors for the whole of 2021. However, despite this significant increase for the global hospitality and tourism industry in January 2022, the numbers remained 67% lower than the pre-pandemic levels.  

The positive growth of tourist arrivals in early 2022 set the course for a record-breaking year since the pandemic’s start. Unfortunately, this positive outlook seems to worsen due to additional challenges.

Hospitality and tourism industry challenges in 2022

The war in Ukraine

While countries worldwide were loosening up their covid-related restrictions, the war in Ukraine came to impose new ones.

The war between Russia and Ukraine, which started on 24 February 2022, hampered global travel and tourism as many European countries closed their airspace to Russian carriers.

Russians and Ukrainians together accounted for a combined 3% of global spending on international tourism in 2020, that are expected to be lost in 2022. At the same time, experts are afraid that a prolonged conflict would have a further cost of $ 14 billion in global tourism.

The hospitality and tourism industries that will suffer the most from this conflict are neighbouring east European countries and various other Mediterranean destinations.

Soaring prices

The Russo-Ukrainian conflict came on top of the existing high inflation raising prices and reducing consumer purchasing power further.

The recent spike in oil and natural gas prices and rising electrical bills make accommodation and transportation significantly more expensive. That adds more pressure on businesses as their profit margins decrease. At the same time, many people will either decide not to travel or spend less during their travels.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) projects that this year’s economic growth will be lower than expected. Specifically, OECD reports that global economic growth will be about 1% lower and inflation 2.5% higher than initially expected.

To wrap up

2022 began with the best possible way for tourism as there were signs of significant improvements in global travel exceeding expectations. Nevertheless, this positive feeling did not last long, as the war in Ukraine later shadowed these positive trends. As the summer season of 2022 is almost upon us, it remains to be seen how the global tourism and hospitality industry will cope with this new uncertainty.

Get to Know HOSTVET

While the world is preparing for the upcoming Summer 2022 season, the HOSTVET project works in the background. It prepares the next generation of tourism professionals and improves the management of existing organizations in the hospitality and tourism industry.

HOSTVET is an Erasmus+ EU project focused on sharing best practices. It develops new strategies for managing hosting organizations for internship programs in tourism and cultural and creative business sectors. It uses Sardinia as an example since it has a low number of businesses involved in EU projects. Tourism and the cultural sectors are essential resources for the area’s economy and need to improve.

The purpose of HOSTVET is the following:

• construct a standard model of rules and processes to be used in international training and apprenticeship initiatives devoted to the heads of the entities concerned,
• identify and disseminate the best approaches for assisting enterprises in participating in the ERASMUS + project,
• increase awareness and knowledge of the ERASMUS + program to facilitate the participation of companies and qualified organizations that will host vocational training students in Europe,
• work on sharing best practices on the management of sending / hospitality organizations that will involve VET learners in mobility projects,
• share best practices that could also have an impact at the ERASMUS + level.

To learn more about HOSTVET EU Project, visit the project’s official website.