Last month’s mass shooting in Las Vegas prompted a 14% drop in UK flight bookings to the city, according to research firm ForwardKeys.
The fall from the UK is slightly less than from Europe as a whole, where the booking trend was plus 2% before the tragedy, but -19% afterwards. The UK trend was also not as marked because bookings were already down 11% year on year, ForwardKeys found.
ForwardKeys, which analyses flight booking transactions, estimates that international bookings as a whole fell 16%, while domestic reservations plummeted 21% in the three weeks after the shooting that left 59 dead and 546 injured.
In international markets, the most dramatic swing was in flight purchases from The Middle East, which were already 26% down and which fell to 41% down, benchmarked on the equivalent period in 2016. Asia Pacific bookings, which were 10% up prior to the massacre, fell to 10% down after it.
ForwardKeys said: “An analysis of origin markets shows negative swings of between 13% and 27% across the board. The worst domestic drop has been in bookings from San Francisco and New York. In the eight weeks prior to the tragedy, they were 6% down and 3% down respectively; in the three weeks post, they were 33% down and 29% down.”
Olivier Jager, ForwardKeys chief executive added: “Looking at the current situation, one can only feel sympathy. What has happened to the victims of the shooting is absolutely shocking and tragic. One also feels sorry for all those people who work in Las Vegas too, they are dedicated to showing visitors a good time and it must be very hard to keep doing that in such awful circumstances.
“Nevertheless, whilst reservations for the coming six months have fallen back; it is not a certainty that the market will stay down. If the US economy picks up; if there are no more similar incidents and if there is a brilliant promotional campaign by Las Vegas, it is possible that the situation can be turned around.”