Travelport GDS today said booking trends in the United States for both its Galileo and Worldspan properties continued to soften through the second quarter and into the third, noting the softness—largely confined to the Americas in the first quarter—has spread to other regions, including Europe and Asia.
During today's second-quarter earnings call, the company's management outlined a slipping transactional environment, reporting a decline in Galileo segments of 5 percent for the second quarter "as the weakness we saw in the Americas in Q1 spread to EMEA and APAC during the second quarter," said CFO Mike Rescoe.
Galileo segments in the Americas decreased 8 percent to 24.6 million, while international segments decreased 4 percent to 43.3 million.
The company is attributing the bulk of the 16 percent decline in Worldspan segments to the loss of Expedia business, but CEO Jeff Clarke said, "Worldspan segments in the second quarter were down 1 percent when you take out Expedia."
Travelport management said declining segment trends accelerated in the early weeks of the third quarter. "July came out pretty much the same as Q2, so July was down single digits as we saw in Q2," Clarke said. "The first ten days of August, however, have been more and more negative. We're now seeing close to double-digit year-over-year declines in the first ten days. Ten days doesn't make a trend, but it's something we're watching very closely."
Unlike the first quarter, when the Americas region created the greatest drag on transaction growth
(BTNonline, June 9), the segment trends have spread to other regions. Clarke said international and domestic booking trends for July and the first ten days of August "are very similar, and that's the difference from the first quarter. In the first quarter, the U.S. was down and Asia was continuing to hop along high single digits, and even double digits in many markets, and Europe was doing quite strong. What we've seen starting this quarter and continuing in the first ten days of August is fairly balanced global performance within a point or two of each other-kind of a mid-single digit decline across all geographies in the second quarter and now looking into double digits in the first ten days of August."
Other GDS executives recently noted similar booking trends. In North America, "It's relatively flat on the TMC side," Amadeus group vice president of the multinational customer group Gillian Gibson said last month. "It differs by region. The U.S. suffers the most followed by Asia, except for Australia because of all the mining and exploration companies' business travel. Europe and the Middle East are still growing."