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The Asia travel pause at Kensington Tours, where monthly sales figures were recently up 80 percent over the same period in 2019, is officially over. Travelers are going to Thailand despite the rainy fall season. They’re booking temple stays in South Korea. They’re going to India at the last minute.
“Vietnam is absolutely bananas,” said Jessica Vandermey, a director of sales at Kensington Tours. “And I’m getting amazing reviews from clients being at Angkor Wat with a handful of people versus the masses.”
After a costly pause in travel that in some places stretched to more than two years, much of Asia is back. Though China remains closed to tourism and Japan has been fine-tuning its policy on independent travelers, hotel and tour operators are reporting strong growth. Intrepid Travel said it’s sending as many Americans to Asia as it did in 2019. At Minor International, a Thailand-based hospitality company that manages Anantara, Avani, NH and other popular hotel brands in the region, bookings have already doubled 2021 totals.
“Consumers have moved beyond revenge travel and are making travel part of their everyday lives again,” said Brett Keller, the chief executive of the online travel agency Priceline, where hotel searches in Asia have nearly tripled in the past year. “This mind-set is taking them beyond the near-border travel they were limited to in the past two years and back to incorporating long-haul, international trips into their lives.”
As in the rest of the world, the pandemic has ruptured the travel landscape in Asia. Rock-bottom prices on flights to and from the region are rare. But the place that was always a value-lover’s deliverance will offer travelers even cheaper prices on the ground for things like hotels and possibly fewer crowds at iconic attractions.
More expensive flights
The first hurdle to travel in Asia — getting there — may be the costliest, at least compared with bargain fares available before 2020. Priceline is tracking round-trip tickets globally to the region at 53 percent more expensive this year compared with 2019, when the average price was about $731.
China’s closure has grounded flights that exerted some of the biggest competitive forces on fares in Asia. Some of the world’s top business destinations, including Shanghai, Taipei and…
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