Excellent news for Rio tourism: Flight bookings booming for the Rio Olympics

Rio is one of the most beautiful world cities to visit. At the same time this world metropole Rio is hungry for some good news when it comes to tourism, and excellent news was released today. This news comes from ForwardKeys in London. At the same time, this news demonstrates also a concern for the travel and tourism outlook for Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, after the upcoming Olympic Games.

With just one month to go before the Olympic Games open, flight bookings to Rio are booming, according to ForwardKeys, which monitors future travel patterns by analyzing 14 million reservation transactions each day.

The peak arrival date for Olympic fans is 4 August, the day before the opening ceremony, but a significant number will start to arrive earlier, from 27 July.

When compared with the same dates last year, forward flight bookings are ahead 148% between 27 July to the Olympic closing day on 21 August. Flight bookings for the Paralympics, which run from 1-18 September, are also strong, up 23%.

Forward bookings show 24% of travellers are staying for 9-13 nights and 23% for 6-8 nights, between 27 July and 18 September. For those visitors staying 22 or more nights, 70% will arrive before 2 August, to soak up the full Olympic experience.

Although air capacity to Rio from the US and Canada has tailed off in 2016, additional seats are scheduled for the Olympics from some key US cities – Miami, New York, Houston and Atlanta, as well as Toronto in Canada.

There’s also increased capacity for the Games from four European airports with direct connections to Rio – Frankfurt, Paris, Lisbon and London. Travel to Rio has been further boosted by the Emirates aircraft upgrade from Dubai as well a new flight from Casablanca.

Total international air capacity to Rio for the Games is up 19% compared with the same period last year, with Latin America up 31%, Europe up 11% and the US and Canada up 9%.

While forward bookings for the Games are strong, the post-Olympic period looks gloomier, down 13% for the same weeks in 2015. The biggest falls are from the US and Canada at -50%, Europe -24% and Asia Pacific -14%.

The picture is brighter within Latin America with forward bookings up 24%, particularly from Argentina and Chile.

Olivier Jager, ForwardKeys Co-founder and CEO, said: “We can only speculate on the reason for a drop in post-Olympic bookings compared with the same weeks last year and it may be that health concerns over the Zika virus have been a factor.”