UK: September 2020: HalalBooking Sales increase 25% Year on Year

PRESS RELEASE

In September 2020, HalalBooking’s sales increased, year on year, for the second month in a row.  Already in August 2020, HalalBooking had made a full post-Covid recovery with sales of $2.7 million, which represented an increase of 10% year on year. In September, results were even better with an increase in overall sales of over 25% compared to the same month in 2019. The company forecasts going back to a rate of 100% year on year growth by December, the growth rate it was experiencing before Covid.

Some markets showed even higher growth levels. In August, the UK leapfrogged Germany to become the company’s biggest source market, with a staggering 85% growth, compared to the same month last year. In September, UK sales also increased, with the month ending 70% up on the same month in 2019. Sales to customers based in Turkey also increased by around 30% in both months.

HalalBooking’s CEO, Elnur Seyidli said: “We are delighted to be reporting such positive results, despite significant new travel restrictions reintroduced for popular destinations such as Spain, France, Morocco and also Turkey, in many of our source markets, notably Germany and the UK, which have traditionally been our largest markets.”

He continued: “Our September figures give us increased confidence that we will be able to return to over 100% growth by December, which is where we were pre-Covid. These levels of growth, against the background of a travel industry which is still struggling, are attracting interest in our Series B campaign, which we launched recently to raise $20 million to super-accelerate our 2021/22 growth and reach $1 billion IPO by 2024.”

The company has seen an increase in domestic tourism, with many customers choosing to stay closer to home in 2020.  In 2019, 90% of HalalBooking’s sales were for international travel. This year, the company has added a large number of European hotels and villas to its website, currently totaling over 28,000 properties, making it well prepared to continue the trend in growth from an increase in domestic travel. Already in 2020 to date, 40% of sales are for domestic travel.

Ufuk Seçgin, HalalBooking’s Chief Marketing Officer, highlighted the fact that customer satisfaction levels had also risen in some of our key destinations, for example, Turkey. He said: “Turkey’s new COVID measures for hotels gave reassurance to our customers for their health and safety and the programme was a complete success.  This can be seen not only from our strong sales recovery but also from the customer review scores. For example, our top-selling beach resorts in Antalya have increased their review score on average by 0.2 from 8.2 to 8.4, comparing this year with 2019, showing just how much our customers have enjoyed their holidays.”