Halal restaurants and prayer rooms are not uncommon in airports around Asia, but has the increasing number of halal-certified hotels, halal food guides at tourist information counters, and even halal-certified cosmetics at duty-free shops caught your eye yet?

As halal tourism continues to gain traction, with Muslim travellers expected to grow to 150 million visitors by 2020, the presence of halal-friendly products and services is expected to soar.

Halal Tourism will grow by 50% (volume) and 35% (value) in the next 5 years. Halal Travellers are those who wish to maintain Muslim principles (i.e. prayer, food, cultural norms) while travelling.  Understanding the variety of different Halal travellers is key as they don’t have the same needs or expectations, even priorities for the same traveller can vary from trip to trip.

According to the Halal Travel 2016 report by Amadeus, spending by Muslim travellers is expected to rise from US$145 billion in 2014 to US$200 billion by 2020, driven by a growing group of younger, educated Muslim consumers with a larger disposable income than before and a greater propensity to travel.

“Muslim travellers are not all the same. Muslims travelling from Egypt will not be the same as those travelling from Saudi. Even within a market, there are big differences. We need to understand their uniqueness in order to sell our products,” said an anonymous Amadeus Travel Agent customer.

To furnish key players of the travel ecosystem with valuable insights to better cater to the needs of this growing market segment, the report shares three key findings and three core themes below.

Amadeus Traveller Trends Observatory (ATTO) created an in-depth report on this matter, which allows one to have a fascinating insight into the growing importance of Halal travel.