2022 is a black year for travel agencies Revenues, branches and staff are declining

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The organized tourism chain is missing the link with 2019, the best year ever before the pandemic. In 2022 travel agencies and tour operators only worked for 9 months and it was a slow start because many long-haul destinations were not yet reachable due to health restrictions. Thus the year is archived with a turnover of 9.3 billion, more than a quarter lower than the 12.7 billion of 2019. This is what emerges from a study conducted by the Assoviaggi-Cst Observatory on organized tourism. The sector as a whole has proven to be resilient, managing to contain the damage caused by the pandemic by losing just over 1,300 employees (-4.5% of the total) excluding agency owners. Between agencies and branches, 283 businesses were closed. «The travel agencies – comments Gianni Rebecchi, president of Assoviaggi Confesercenti – resisted but, in the end, they had to face the long crisis triggered by Covid with cost reduction strategies, in particular by closing the local units and, unfortunately, reducing the personal. Suffered cuts, which could have been avoided if past governments had acted more quickly”. A heavy loss of workers passed over in silence.

Operators experienced a soft restart with an average turnover of 806 thousand euros against 1,115 thousand in 2019. The best numbers are recorded by the businesses in the North West, with an average of 1.04 million euros, followed by the North East ( 967 thousand euros) and from the Center (910 thousand). On the other hand, the turnover of travel agencies in the South and Islands (471,000) is decidedly below the national average. Despite some territorial differences, the turnover gap has not been recovered in any region. The best result, in fact, is that of Campania, where in any case the turnover of organized tourism records a contraction of -20.2% compared to 2019; travel agencies and tour operators from Puglia follow, limiting losses to -20.9%. The widest gap is instead recorded in the Marche region (-41.5%), followed by the autonomous provinces of Trento and Bolzano (-37%), but the distance from pre-covid levels remains above the national average for all regions with the exception, in addition to Campania and Puglia, of Emilia-Romagna (-26.2%), Lazio (-25.8%), Sicily (-25.9%), Tuscany (-26.1%) and Veneto (-24.6%). However, the market remains highly concentrated: three regions (Lombardy, Lazio and Piedmont) account for 49.1% of the total 2022 turnover of Italian organized tourism. The difficult economic situation has launched a restructuring process to contain costs with the passage from 4,341 companies in 2019 to 4,058 in 2022 with a -6.5% while employees have gone from 28,778 in 2019 to 27,470 in 2022, with a loss of -4.5%, equal to 1,308 fewer workers. The most drastic cuts in Valle d’Aosta, Sardinia, Emilia-Romagna, Marche and Umbria. In contrast Calabria, Molise and Puglia.