12 Skift Research Charts Explaining Covid’s Impact on Travel in 2021

This year has thrown 12 long and often challenging months at the travel industry. To recap the year, Skift Research has pulled together 12 charts that explain how the travel industry was impacted by, and responded to, the Covid pandemic.

Most of the charts in this overview are taken from our report Skift Research Global Travel Outlook 2022, with a sprinkling of additional insights we produced throughout the year. 

Save 20 percent on any Skift Research report mentioned in this article. Use code BESTOF2021 at checkout to save.

Skift Research has been tracking the recovery of the flight, hotel, short-term rental, and car rental sectors in 22 countries since the start of the pandemic. One continuing truth is that recovery is extremely unequal, with the latest November 2021 data showing that North and Latin America are close to full recovery, while Asia Pacific lingers around 50 percent of pre-pandemic performance levels.  

For more information about travel’s recovery, check Skift Research’s Recovery Index.

While the travel industry is clearly still impacted by the Covid pandemic, there are certain areas where we did see strong recovery in 2020. Dometic tourism is one of those areas, and Skift Research survey data shows that this strong performance continued. While we saw trip participation increase in 2021, international trip share barely increased, with domestic travel still preferred amongst U.S. travelers.

To better understand U.S traveler behavior and sentiment, check the latest U.S. Travel Tracker.

Despite a significant rollout of the vaccine in 2021, albeit unequal, cross-border travel dropped even further than 2020 levels. The first quarter in 2020 was, of course, strong, while 2021 did not see a single quarter which came even close to 2019 levels. According to our estimat