International Luxury Travel Market (ILTM) has published a white paper providing substantiated data on the vital role luxury travel could play in driving regional economic recovery.

ILTM is the leading ‘by invitation only’ event for the global luxury travel community, with a flagship event in Cannes and regional editions in Africa, Arabia, China, Latin America, North America and Asia Pacific.

Coronavirus has played havoc with this year’s schedule, with five events postponed to date. Sales are still steady on ILTM Cannes which takes place in December. In the meantime, to help support industry recovery, the team has produced a white paper and podcast on ‘Luxury Travel’s True Impact on Business and Employment’  to demonstrate just how important the global luxury travel universe is. The white paper has been sent out free of charge to nearly 13,000 ILTM customers, partners and industry stakeholders worldwide.

“We wanted to give the industry something of tangible value which no one else had provided before – substantiated data which they can take to their governments/owners and stakeholders to demonstrate the vital contribution luxury travel can make to kick-start economies when lockdown is lifted” says Alison Gilmore, Portfolio Director. “It’s easy to dismiss luxury travel as something frivolous and unnecessary – in fact, as the report shows, our US$2 trillion industry would rank in the top 10 if it were a global economy; if it were a country, it would be bigger than Italy.” 

Working with their PR company, the ILTM team created a strategic plan to engage +30 global influential travel writers and editors,  to get the message out to the industry via their own online portals, and social media. The results of this have added to the campaign and are still ongoing. 

In the week following its launch, the report was downloaded over 2,350 times and received +4,500 unique web page views. The podcast had over 1,600 downloads, reaching 66 countries and 445 cities.

“These results speak to the power of the industry data we provided, as do the many wonderful emails I have received thanking us for our support” says Alison. “We are now working on a follow-up report, this time taking a deep dive into Asia”.