- Ozgur Tore
Air travel to Nice, already down due to previous terrorist attacks in France, has plunged further following the latest outrage on the 14 July Bastille Day holiday. After the 14 July attack, daily net bookings to Nice for any future arrival date dropped by 57% compared to the net bookings issued during the same period in 2015.
This drop was caused by an immediate rush of full cancellations of bookings made previously plus a decline in new bookings to Nice, which has persisted.
As an immediate reaction, international visitor arrivals in Nice dropped by 9.4% in the week after the attack, when compared with the same time last year, according to ForwardKeys, which monitors future travel patterns by analyzing 14 million flight reservation transactions each day. Across the country, post-attack arrivals were down 8.8%.
Future air bookings for the summer season, up to the end of September, have also been hit, with France down 20% and Nice down 19%.
Looking ahead to August and September, ForwardKeys data shows that flight bookings to Nice for the coming two months were already down 14% before 14 July and fell a further 5% in the days following the terrorist attack.
Olivier Jager, ForwardKeys Co-founder and CEO, said: “Ever since the Charlie Hebdo attack last January, France has been suffering from a reduction in tourism confidence and just as bookings started to recover, another attack has taken place. Prior to the Bastille Day truck tragedy, Nice had been less affected than Paris but news of this incident has further damaged travel to both Nice and France as a whole.”
