NEW DELHI: A fresh surge in covid-19 cases in the country and the discovery of double mutant variant of the coronavirus, poses a challenge to India's tourism, travel and aviation sector that was at the cusp of a recovery.
Hotel and airline bookings have declined 10-15% in the last 10 days or so, which can be attributed to the rising number of infections and resulting restrictions imposed by some states, said a senior official of a National Capital Region or NCR-based online travel company.
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"Though, this is not a big threat at the moment, the recovery of the sector could be impacted if the number of cases keeps on rising," the person said requesting anonymity.
For the week ended on 20 March, the average number of airline departures declined to 2,288 from 2,294 in the previous week, ICICI Securities said in a recent report. "Rising covid cases remain an overhang on air traffic," the report added.
India recorded 53,476 new cases over the past 24 hours, the highest single-day jump so far this year, taking the nationwide tally to 1,17,87,534, the health ministry said on Thursday.
The country has the third-highest active caseload worldwide, behind the US and Brazil.
Maharashtra, Punjab, Kerala, Karnataka and Chhattisgarh are the five states that have seen the biggest single-day surge in cases.
This comes at a time when search queries for domestic air travel and holidays were beginning to show a rise following the roll out of vaccines.
"Demand and search queries for air travel are slowly increasing MoM (month-on-month), and domestic travel is on the road to a strong recovery," said Rajnish Kumar, CTO and co-founder at online travel portal ixigo.
The company saw good bookings for travel during the long festival weekend for Holi between 27 March and 4 April. Top routes that were booked, according to ixigo data, were New Delhi-Patna, Bengaluru-New Delhi, New Delhi-Goa, Bengaluru-Patna, New Delhi-Bengaluru, Bengaluru-Kolkata, Cochin-Guwahati, New Delhi-Kolkata, Bengaluru-Guwahati.
"We are seeing a spurt in flight bookings for the Holi holidays, which is mostly the VFR (visiting friends and relatives) traffic. However, leisure travel has been slower to pick up," said a senior official with a Gurgaon-based airline, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"The rise in the number of covid-19 cases is a challenge. Though it is not expected to impact the VFR traffic, as people will continue to visit their friends and family during the pandemic, it could delay the improvement in leisure traffic, and impact the overall revival of the sector," the person added.
The second wave of covid-19 infections could last up to 100 days counted from 15 February, said a report from State Bank of India (SBI) on Thursday.
"Air travel has slowly inched towards the level it was at, in the initial phase of COVID-19 in 2020 as visible from the 7-day moving average of total number of flights tracked by flightradar 24, as global cases figures tumble and mass vaccination efforts gather speed. However, a plethora of new variants emerging still make a case for being wary about the overall recovery in air travel," said the report authored by SBI's group chief economic adviser Soumya Kanti Ghosh.
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