Germans Still Taking Vacations While Others Stay Home : Kathika Travel Website

By Amanda Kendle

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It will be a while before we hear the end of the phrase “economic downturn” and in the travel and tourism industry, the picture is looking pretty bleak. With plenty of tourism statistics taking a dive around the world – fewer flight tickets being bought, fewer hotel rooms being booked and more people planning to spend their vacation time at home this year – it is interesting to compare how some nations are doing better than others.

Germans Always Love to Travel

Apparently it is not just a stereotype – Germans really do love to travel, and they do it more than anyone else. Or at the very least, they spend more than anyone else, according to a recent survey on the amount of money spent on vacations across nationalities during 2008. Germans came in at number one with almost $US85 billion. So far in 2009, some German travel agents feel that the spending might be slowing, but not dramatically, so odds are good that Germans will continue to spend close to this massive amount of money on the travel industry this year, despite the downturn.

Other Countries Give Freebies as Travel Incentives

In other countries where tourism has taken a more dramatic hit, there are incentive schemes galore to encourage people to take vacations, especially within their own country to help boost the local economy. In many western countries including the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, hotels have offered extremely cheap rates and transport operators including bus, train and air have started special deals to entice customers to purchase tickets.

One extreme example is in Australia, a country whose great distance from most of the world means that getting there is usually quite expensive, and is therefore already suffering the effects of a sharp downturn in tourism spending. There is currently a proposal ready for the government to decide on in which the government itself might pay tourists to visit Australia. More precisely, the proposal is that the government might use part of the tourism budget to pay for the airfares of tourists who agree to spend more than A$5,000 while in Australia – the idea is that with the weak Australian dollar, this is not such a large amount of money for many tourists, and they might be persuaded to switch their vacation Down Under.

If you’re surviving the recession without too much damage, keep your eye out – you might pick up some really great travel bargains to take advantage of the bad times for travel-related companies.
photo credit: chaosinjune