New Travel Trends from Fitur Tourism Fair : Kathika Travel Website

By Amanda Kendle

Mixx Facebook

Tweet This

The Fitur International Tourism Trade Fair is happening all this weekend in Madrid, Spain – and in fact it started on Wednesday so there has already been quite a lot of interesting news. The travel trends for the future are being heavily discussed, as well as how to deal with tourism and travel downturns due to the world economic crisis. The trade fair runs through to Sunday, February 1, so there might be more announcements to come.

The Statistics Behind Fitur

When you know how large Fitur is, it’s no surprise that important travel news comes out of it. Over 13,000 companies are participating in the trade fair this year, representing 170 different countries. And perhaps more importantly, over 8,000 journalists are expected to attend to get news and stories to spread to the rest of the traveling world. Along with them, there should be close to 100,000 general public visitors and more than 150,000 professional travel industry visitors.

Trend for Travel to “Global Hotspots”

One of the clearest trends to come out of Fitur is that travel to global hotspots is becoming more popular. By “global hotspots”, they mean countries which are politically unsettled, are in the news for all the wrong reasons or have previously been off-limits to Western tourists.

For example, visits to North Korea are becoming more popular. The statistics show that in 2001, there were just 600 foreign visitors to the country; in 2008, there were 4,500, nearly eight times as many. However, it’s still the case that you can only visit North Korea as part of a (strictly controlled) guided tour. Other nations which are increasing in popularity for travelers include Zimbabwe, Libya, Iran and the Palestinian territories.

Economic Problems and the Tourism Industry

Naturally, there has been a lot of interest in dealing with the economic downturn and the effect that this will have on the global tourism industry. The Tourism Reactivation Committee is meeting at Fitur and they warned that the economic crisis is likely to affect all kinds of destinations for tourists – in both developed and developing nations.

The importance of keeping tourist development sustainable and ecologically sound was also discussed and connected to the economic crisis – in the sense that sustainable tourism development shouldn’t be sacrificed just because times are tough. The committee said that all tourism developers should make a commitment to creating sustainable tourism projects with the problems of climate change at the forefront.