INTERNATIONAL travel spend is predicted to rise massively over the next decade due to a surge in households attaining the means to embark on cross-border holidays.
According to Visa’s first-ever Global Travel & Tourism Report, an estimated 282 million households will travel at least once per year by 2025, up nearly 35 percent from 2015. Consequently, travel expenditure is expected to reach US$5,305 per household annually, excluding air fares.
Leading the growth for the next 10 years are emerging markets, especially China, with travel spend anticipated to rise 86 per cent to US$255 billion, almost double that of the next largest spender, the US, standing at US$134 billion with 33 per cent growth.
Developed markets such as Germany and the UK will still account for a significant volume of global travel spend (up 31 per cent to US$97 billion and up 58 per cent to US$96 billion respectively), but will experience much less increase compared to emerging markets.
Russia, for instance, only accounted for US$22 billion in travel spend in 2015, but will rise 118 per cent to US$49 billion in 10 years’ time.
Visa added in its report several trends that are fueling this surge, notably that nearly half of all global households (945 million) will have the monetary means to travel by 2025.
As well, travellers over 65 years of age will more than double their international travel to an estimated 180 million trips per year, accounting for one-in-eight cross-border trips globally.
This bodes well for the medical tourism segment as Visa predicts aging travellers, who tend to spend more and travel for longer, to combine their leisure trips with medical pursuits.
At the same time, the development of 340 new airports globally over the next decade and the increasingly rapid spread of travel information from now till 2025 will also be a boon for connectivity and foster greater interest and conveniences in travel.
“Travelling internationally will become more common and attainable in the future thanks to changing demographics, combined with technology advances that make travelling abroad easier and less expensive,” said Wayne Best, chief economist at Visa.
“What will emerge is an expanding ‘traveling class’ that will spend a growing portion of their household income on cross-border travel. Tomorrow’s travelling class will likely be older and hail from emerging markets — looking very different from today’s typical international traveller.”
