CNN Travel’s Trending Destinations 2022: Where Do Americans Want to Go? An Analysis of Google Flights’ 2022 Top Ten Searches
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It’s no surprise that travel-related searches picked up big time in 2022, as more destinations re-opened and dropped Covid-related regulations like mandatory testing.
Among the various data released by the tech company is a list of top 10 trending destinations on its online flight booking search service Google Flights, which gives clues about where Americans want to go this year and beyond.
A rep from the company says that the searches that had a high surge in traffic over a long period of time are called “trending” queries.
While Lisbon’s popularity could just be due to the fact that it’s a nice place to go on vacation, it’s likely some of the searches were for one-way tickets.
Portugal offers a range of visas that make it relatively easy for Americans and other non-European Union citizens to move there — in fact, even Madonna has lived in Lisbon.
The Asian countries were a lot slower to reopen than the European ones. The Asia-Pacific is going to lose its title as the world’s biggest travel region this year.
That could explain why Ho Chi Minh City placed high on Google Flights’ trending list. Vietnam reopened to tourism in early 2022, while Japan and China remained closed.
Meanwhile, India’s two big hubs, Mumbai and New Delhi, also made the US Google Flights list. US citizens with a passport can apply for travel visas online in India.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/google-flights-trending-destinations-2022/index.html
The Top 100 City Destinations Index: Paris, France, and the late-2020 Expo 2020 Dubai-London, Tokyo and Brussels are “the best-performing”
However, the huge influx of travelers landed Toronto ended on a different, less distinguished list earlier this year — Pearson Airport was named the worst in the world for flight delays and cancellations during the peak summer season.
The attractiveness of 100 cities Worldwide is compared each year in six categories, including tourism policy and performance, infrastructure, health and safety, and economic performance.
Asia had a mixed performance regionally due to Covid-related travel restrictions, but Asian cities made some of the biggest leaps in performance. Singapore moved up the list to be praised for being the most business-friendly destination, with simplified taxation and large share of skilled employees.
In the last two years, Paris has held onto its position as the top city in the Top 100 City destinations Index, with eight of the top 10 being European neighbors.
The new report, obtained exclusively by CNN, praises the French capital as “the world’s best-performing destination,” due to its “exceptional performance across the Tourism Policy and Attractiveness, Tourism Infrastructure and Tourism Performance pillars.”
When it comes to actual international arrivals, it was still number two, but it was top of the list. Almost double the number of inbound trips were made in this year’s performance. This would have been helped in no small part by the delayed Expo 2020 Dubai , which ran from October 2021 to March 2022.
“While 2022 was a positive year for the travel sector, the road to full post-pandemic recovery is long, and government support remains critical across all regions,” said Euromonitor. It pointed to rising inflation, a bad economy and the war in Ukraine as reasons why it might be hard for tourism to rebound.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/euromonitor-top-city-destinations-index-2022/index.html
Emerging tourism in Europe: Euromonitor’s top ten rankings and forecast for the next few years to come out of the recession
Amsterdam was at number three, Madrid at four, Rome at five and London rose two places this year to No. 6. After jumping up the rankings two places, Berlin and Barcelona are no. 9 and 7 respectively.
New York was the last place in the top 10, although the report did say that US cities showed strong rebound in tourism performance.
The return of international travel, both inbound and outbound, is sure to shake up the rankings according to Euromonitor.