CampingVillage.Marketing Observatory 2021: a snapshot of the open-air market

Confirmation of growth for open-air tourism, large number of potential new customers, attitude to compare accommodation facilities before choosing where to spend the holidays. These are the main elements that emerge from the 2021 Observatory created in Italy by CampingVillage.Marketing. The analysis, obtained by extrapolating all the data of the requests that tourists have addressed to the structures through the network of CampingVillage.Travel portals in 2021, reports various interesting data, which can help to better focus on how to offer your services to the public.

The first fact that stands out is that general interest has grown considerably. The views of the company’s portal network saw growth of 64.1% compared to 2020 and 18.7% compared to 2019, with a consequent increase in requests and calls generated. Another important fact to point out is that 77.23% of the total 2021 views came from new users. Booking requests sent through the network portals, and that the structures receive via email, increased by 19.5% compared to 2020 and even by 36% compared to 2019.

Before choosing, the comparison

Those who have made online requests have done so, in about half of the cases (46.96%), in a multiple way, that is by requesting information from several structures at the same time (CampingVillage.Travel allows it for a maximum of 10). This is a clear indicator that potential customers want to compare facilities and offers before deciding where to go.

It is not a surprise to find that most of the requests concern the summer months, August in the lead, but after the peak recorded in 2020 the situation is returning to normal, so much so that the requests for the months of July and September were higher than 2019. The first 2022 projections also show positive signs both for the month of June and for the winter months in the mountains.

With tourism that focuses on a greater number of holidays during the year, it is normal to see an abbreviation in the length of stays: the 10 average nights in 2019 dropped to 8 in 2020 to go back to 9 in 2021. For as regards the situation based on the months, those that see the longest periods are May (11 nights), July (10) and December (10), with an April that marks a record of 19 nights but influenced by the presence of requests for seasonal pitches. Reading these figures, it is good to take into account that it is not the actual durations (which can be influenced by many factors, including the minimum duration imposed by some structures in certain periods), but those required.

It is researched well in advance

Another interesting fact to analyze is that of the so-called “booking windows”, that is the period of time that passes from the first request to the actual check-in in the structure. From the average 77 days of 2019, it collapsed to 39 in 2020 and then readjusted to 60 in 2021. These data also show that the portals are used by tourists in the very first phase of the structure’s search process.

People who use the portals almost always do so to look for accommodation rather than a pitch: 92.56% against 7.44%. The demand for pitches shows only a slight increase, having started from 6.99 percent in 2019. At the demographic level, families with children represent 78.46 percent of all requests, while 12.51 percent travel with a pet. It is noteworthy that this value was only 5.31 percent in 2019.

Finally, it is interesting to note that the additional request that is most often expressed is that of being able to have meals included (13.76%), the presence of the beach (9.59%) and the possibility of accepting the Italian “holiday bonus” (8.16%). The CampingVillage.Travel Observatory 2021 (available in Italian) concludes with the analysis of the interest in themed holidays, which in the first three places sees the beaches (for the first time so high in the last three years), the lake (an evergreen), and glamping (in a big climb compared to 2019, but down on 2020).