International departures for the first two weeks of this month do confirm that, in five out of the six regions of the world, a recovery is under way:
✓ the changes, compared with the same period in October, across the five regions show increases of between 12% and 36% points
✓ in Europe it is quite another matter where departures have crashed by almost 30% and October was already significantly down on September.
This, when taken in conjunction with the surge in travel searches recorded as a result of vaccination speculation, leads weight to the argument that the second and third quarters of 2021 may be substantially better than expected.
All of that notwithstanding, the hard November data does contain important country specifics in the cases of China, India, Japan and the USA.