Dertour: Long haul travel is booming after coronavirus

Dertour Group expanded in all areas last year and has submitted optimistic forecasts for travel in 2024. The group, which claims to be the second largest tour operator in Europe, achieved a 23 per cent increase in turnover in 2023, as the CEO of Dertour, Dr. Ingo Burmester, reported on Wednesday at ITB Berlin. And long haul travel is booming following the setbacks caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

The expansion in long haul travel is being fed above all by bookings to Asia, where destinations had experienced very severe and long-lasting restrictions because of the pandemic. During the winter season that is just coming to an end the figures for India and Vietnam easily doubled, according to Burmester. He also reported 61 per cent increases for Indonesia and South Africa, and 52 per cent for Thailand.

These trends are emphatically confirmed by the prospects for the summer of 2024. Moreover customers have resumed making early reservations. Given these figures a 30 percent increase in turnover is expected for the summer of 2024 along with a 24 per cent rise in visitor numbers.

Burmester is also positively surprised to see that the trend of recent years for ever shorter journeys has been broken. Compared with 2019 the average duration of vacations has risen to 8.1 days. The head of Dertour supports the travel agency concept. He reports that 47 per cent of customers rely on personal advice prior to making their bookings, and travel agency customers are also in the majority when it comes to the rate of recommendations.

It is intended that future growth should also be driven by the expansion of hotels, as was announced by Burmester. The Rewe subsidiary is launching a new brand presence for the coming season: the DER Touristik Group becomes DERTOUR Group, for reasons of easier international legibility, according to the CEO. Furthermore the name, placed above an oval-shaped, variable red field, will now appear on all hotel and tour operator brands. However, specific local subsidiary brands, as in the case of hotel groups, for example, will be retained.