Last week we hosted a webinar where we dug into some key data to help understand and predict trends for the travel and tourism sectors as we head into the summer. Since Europe was locked down earlier than North America, it has also started opening up sooner. As a comparison, we looked first at foot traffic in European airports to see whether there are any early signs of a pick-up in visitors coming into the peak holiday period.

As one of the sectors hit hardest by the pandemic, hotels, resorts and leisure facilities are hoping that the summer may offer a recovery in the form of reduced case numbers and fewer cancelled vacations. A critical period for the industry, a bounce back in July and August could help mitigate some of the losses from the past few months. Our analysis of foot traffic, using our Hotel, Resort and Leisure Index, shows a very mixed picture across different states.

Earlier this week we shared our global Sector Tracker that analyzes recovery trends by highlighting the sector with most week-over-week growth in each country. Last week, in the US, it was the transportation sector the had seen the biggest uptick in activity, based on our analysis of foot traffic at key locations. Since a significant share of traffic measured in this sector comes from airports, this is an indicator of an important trend for the travel industry.

In New York City, the MTA has stated that it’s seen “ridership tick down a bit in the last week or so.” For anyone who lives there, it probably feels like more than a bit of a tick down, with subway platforms empty at rush hour and the usually bustling Grand Central terminal eerily quiet. In order to visualize what is happening at one of the busiest train terminals in the world, we looked at year-over-year foot traffic numbers at Grand Central to see just how much visitors numbers have fallen in the past few weeks.

Has travel been affected by the coronavirus, and if so by how much and where? The overall volume of passengers traveling by air affects many of disparate industries - not just airlines but travel sites and aggregators that sell tickets, hotels and car rental companies that rely on airports for a large volume of their business, credit card companies, restaurants and retailers. The list can go on. To try and gauge the impact that a reduction in travel due to the coronavirus might be having on these sectors and more, we analyzed foot traffic in key US and international airports.