Every year the tourism industry is especially curious about
latest early booking trends. The experience shows that
earlybird's behaviour is allowing a good estimation about how a destination will compete with other regions. In order to contribute insights for the European boat charter market, I evaluated boat reservation data of the last 3 years from 2017 until 2019. The data is based on yacht charter bookings done via the
YachtSys Reservation Platform, which lists nearly 5,000 charter yachts worldwide.
In the graph below you can see the
percentage of pre-bookings (in relation to whole booking volume) for leading destinations since 2017. Notice: As pre-booking we consider a charter reservation that happens at least 5 months before the travel begin.
The bar charts show the
Early Booking Trends at the end of January 2019 for the leading destinations for boat charter:
Croatia, Greece, Italy, Spain, Germany and Turkey. End of January is an ideal due date for such an evaluation, becasue it marks the expiration of the majority of
Early Booking discounts for the European summer's boat rental destinations.
A view on the graph above reveals, that since three consecutive years, early bird bookings are
slightly decreasing for Croatian and Spanish destinations, even though these are leading charter countries. For the Balearics this deficit could be expected because the customer's demand was a bit weak during summer 2018 - probably due to relative high costs compared to other Mediterranean regions.
The drop of 8 % pre-booking volume for Croatia since 2017, very likely the revitalization of Greece as charter destination, was causally.
Early bird reservations for
Italy were more or less constant on a level of 12 - 13% of the market volume during the last years. In a January's statistic about
pre-bookings in Italy, there is missing the big potential of Italian customers, which almost never book their boats more than 3 months in advance.
Greece, by far the country with the
highest share of Early Bookings (over 30%), faces in 2019 a slight decrease from 38% to 36%. Maybe this loss of earlybird potential
helped to improve the trend for Turkey, which showed the first time since years a positive pre-booking tendency of + 2% (3 - 5%).
Interesting are the figures in
Germany. The
very positive early bird trend for the Baltic Sea and Interior waters, which was announced already by charter providers during a symposium at the BOOT in Düsseldorf, is significantly represented through the 10% bar value for 2019 (+ 7% compared to 2018). Charter company owners confirmed that the
exceptional good climate during the summer 2018, encouraged boaters to book in advance, in order to get their favourite boats reserved.
Summary: It can be stated that the early booking trend follows the tendency of the previous years 2017 and 2018 with lower demand for Spanish and Croatian yacht charter destinations. The exception are Greece, Turkey and Germany. Turkey shows increasing demand for 2019 that costed the Greek market already some charter bookings. Germany is benefiting from the sunny and dry summer of previous season.
We are all curious how the booking statistics for the leading boat rental destinations will evolve during spring and summer 2019.