Some 80% of Europeans continue to travel for their holidays according to a new Eurobarometer survey on ‘The attitudes of Europeans towards tourism 2010’.
There seems to be at last some light at the end of the tunnel for the tourism industry in Europe. European pockets are emerging from the financial crisis and beginning to find more money to visit foreign countries and stay in foreign hotels.
In 2009, most tourists used surveys to vent their frustrations about not having the funds to make a trip to a different country. Hotels were suffering as a result of the reluctance of Europeans to fill beds and the less said about airlines the better. Indeed, many people stayed at home to make use of their time off work to save some cash. However, European tourism is beginning to emerge from this nightmare and the number of Europeans not traveling for financial reasons is dropping.
Out of 30,000 random Europeans asked in a recent survey by European Commission, just 20% said that they will stay at home during holiday time to save money. This figure may still seem rather high, yet is minimal considering that it was 33% last year. From different aspect, some 80 percent of Europeans continue to travel for their holidays. On a similar note, 5% more people (46%) of those who were planning to spend a holiday away from home in 2010 said that they had sufficient funds available to spend on traveling.
Unsurprisingly, there is still an element of gloom surrounding the Eastern European market with tourists unwilling to spend money on trips from countries such as Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary. This is worthy of note as these countries saw the biggest amount of growth in outbound tourism before the crisis hit. Improved roads and land transport systems are continuing to affect the airline companies as many tourists still travel to their destinations by road. Only one third of outbound tourists used the airlines to travel for leisure last year.