Business as Usual or Completely Different? COVID-19 and Its Influence on the Participation in Tourism of the German Population
As one of the first economic sectors, the COVID-19 pandemic had a clear impact on tourism since the beginning of 2020, especially on international tourism flows. Thus, the worldwide volume of international travel arrivals in 2020 reached only 27.9 % of 2019. In Germany, according to the Reiseanalyse (RA 2021), travel volume 2020 reached about 71 % (number of trips) and travel participation was about 81 % (share of travellers) and travel spending was about 62 % of 2019. Taking the tourism of the population living in Germany as an example, this chapter uses a population- representative survey on travel behaviour and the application of a Gradient Boosting Machine to investigate how the influencing variables relevant to individual travel decisions have changed in the period from 2019 to 2021. To do this, 12 sociodemographic variables are inserted into a model that predicts the relative influence on the likelihood of leisure travel participation in 2021. By comparing with a previous study (Filimon et al., 2022), it shows that the importance of variables for individual travel decisions changed remarkably over the observation period (especially household income and age). In addition, we find that the importance of the variables influencing travel decisions is clearly moving back towards the pre-COVID-19 structures as the pandemic subsides, although there has not (yet) been a complete realignment.