Group travel is seeing a global rebound, with advanced bookings to The Bahamas now climbing to pre-recession levels, according to the Bahamas Hotel Association (BHA).
Group travel accounts for a little more than a quarter of the stopover business in The Bahamas, according to BHA president Stuart Bowe. It suffered during the recession, but Bowe told Guardian Business yesterday that advanced bookings for the balance of the year and into the next are heading in the right direction.
“Advanced bookings for groups are up considerably and now approaching pre-recession levels. Group business, predominately comprised of business-related groups, represents just over 25 percent of our business,” Bowe said. “Advanced bookings thru 2012 are promising.”
The group travel business impacts on a hotel’s operations in a meaningful way that goes beyond the percentage of occupancy it accounts for. In a November Guardian Business report, George Markantonis, president and managing director of Kerzner International Bahamas, explained the importance of these travellers to a resort’s operations.
A strong group base relieves the downward pressure on room rates, allowing hotels to maintain higher prices for their entire room inventory, Markantonis explained. Hotels could therefore see higher room receipts and usually a healthier bottom line. He added that even industry experts had underestimated how hard it would be to recover lost corporate profits from the fall-off in group business.
The news of strong advanced group bookings coincides with numbers recently released in GetThere’s Corporate Travel Benchmark Report April 2011. GetThere is a leading provider of travel, expense and meetings management services for international corporate travelers.
According to the report, there were signs of a steady recovery in corporate travel in 2010, a trend that is expected to continue into 2011, according to the report. More corporate travel roughly translates into more group travel business. Around 61 percent of the respondents to GetThere’s survey in the report expected their corporate travel budgets to increase this year compared to last year, by anywhere from one to 10 percent.
