Who goes to the UK for holidays in summer anyway?

Domestic tourism works a little differently to how foreign tourists behave. A person from outside Europe will be very keen to spend quite a bit of time in London and the likes of Oxford/Cambridge, York, Bath, Stratford-upon-Avon and Edinburgh... and spend heavily on accommodation and restaurants in these places. Conversely, Brits on holiday within the UK tend more towards Devon/Cornwall, north Wales, Cumbria, etc... one tends not to see many people from Birmingham choosing to spend heavily on several nights in an expensive hotel in central London when it's only 1h30 by train. Furthermore, the accommodation available in the likes of Devon/Cornwall is already geared for high occupancy in the summer in a normal year.... it cannot readily absorb millions more people in school holidays and not many Brits want to visit Devon in October when there is space

It's a nice idea to encourage Brits to stay in the UK for their summer hols but the jobs and hospitality industry buildings cannot be readily moved to new locations in a hurry

There may well be a need to allow tourists in the UK, just to ensure that London's hospitality trade sees some revenue - and that means easing the "PCR test in advance and 10 days quarantine on arrival" requirement

Banana joe

Have you ever been to Edinburgh in August?

The96er

No it will eventually reopen but not necessarily when the U.K. population is vaccinated as all that good work could be undone if a new rouge strain was brought into the U.K. Most countries in the world will have not even started vaccination programmes come summer and Europe could take until the Autumn to finish. Then there is the issue of those countries like France where only just over half the population said they will take the vaccine so their infection rate will probably still be high. The question then becomes do we want unvaccinated French walking the streets of the U.K. infecting unvaccinated British who have also refused vaccinations?

Banana Joe

Yesterday I just booked a holiday in England at the start of the summer holidays and will book another for the end of the summer holidays today.

Maybe the question should be how many people will take a chance booking an independent foreign holiday after what happened last year? Package holidays are reported to be a 7th more expensive so that will kill the demand together with incomes being decimated since the pandemic.

It looks increasingly likely that the U.K. government are going to implement enforced hotel quarantine, as is done in many other parts of the world. Without specific financial aid that will be game over for most airlines. I just can’t see where this is all going to end for our industry. It was the first industry to be effected by COVID (with border closures), and it’ll be the last to emerge, whenever that may be....!

The airline industry might have a future similar to the coal mining industry and just end up being a shadow of its former self. It was becoming unsustainable anyway and the Paris accord is not going to help so the industry was due for a rebalance anyway even before Covid. It is all a matter of degree.

LTNman... why are you hanging around in a professional pilots forum? You seem to be taking great pleasure in announcing what you believe will be the end of most of our careers.

If having a holiday in the British Isle this year is the safest way, then there are plenty of routes which can be used by air to do this. The weather in Jersey and the south west is generally quite good in summer and the uptake in flights should grow if anything like last year is to go by.

Any source for that statement?

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a...ains-qgl5q3dkk

Several other articles in today’s papers. Might not happen, but the press have generally been pretty accurate at giving a ‘heads up’ on the latest covid merry-go-round changes, before the official government announcement.

SOP of this Government is to drip feed stuff to the press, see what reaction there is- then proceed on the hoof. A bit like the pre testing on arrivals, then forgetting to set a specific date, then forgetting to add the specific test(s) acceptable. All in all, the usual Capt. Mainwaring approach.

On the jabs, for European destinations- it'll be overseas countries that'll decide if tourists are welcome or not- regardless what the UK says. As for the long haul, there isn't a cat in hell that Asian countries are going to be welcoming Brits anytime soon- jabbed or not.
(Kind of makes the Ryanair Jab & go Ads rather silly)

You are right to say that the host country will decide whether to welcome tourists or not. I understand that 80% of the Japanese people are against the Olympics taking place this summer and we’re only talking about the influx of athletes and officials.

Are we happy to welcome 10’s of 1000’s to our shores for the football this summer?

More people travel to UK to watch football over the course of a season that will travel to Euro21 in UK, assumming it stays on current basis. An Irish journalist did a survey and for UK teams there were 15-20,000 season ticket holders based in Ireland. This wasn't counting across EU where reckoning was another 2,000. Adding in the people who go to odd match and reckoning that just between 500,000 to 750,000 of attendance of Uk Premiership games are from abroad across a season. This not taking into account Scottish premier league or lower leagues.

GA F15

Not an unrealistic view but as most airports are foreign owned then no need for UK Govt to do anything. Maybe pick up pieces at the end.

As in nationalise them! Airports are national infrastructure assets and should never have been privatised in the first place.

davidjohnson6

Domestic tourism En-masse doesn't work in the UK. The resort of my town in the UK was swamped well beyond any reasonable capacity for the August bank holiday 2020. Nobody will take that kind of vacation again by choice.

While tempting to let the airport owners go bankrupt and then nationalise, UK plc will likely see pain if airport operating companies go bust. We need the national infrastructure to remain operational, or capable of being reactivated at very short notice. Letting *all* the fire crews and ATC bods receive P45s before HM Govt steps in is unlikely to end well. An ATC person is worth far more to the UK than a barman in a pub

ATNotts

UK taxpayer happy to have the benefits of the sale of BAA, of course BAA was never a monopoly until the day after it was sold to Ferrovial.

DJ

Let them go bust and then Tupe across the personnel while walking away from the debts. Do not be surprised if there is a train of Govt thought that would be happy to do this.

...this thought sadly may now be an option on the table for many companies...

ATNotts

Are we being serious here? If we are then a new thread is surely required. Perhaps nationalism is required for transport of all types and many other industries.

racedo

And as for the airports that are not owned by state entities?

To be honest, it’s getting closer to the point where LTN will need to be sold up.

LTNman

What a load of rubbish. Over the last 5 years, ignoring COVID, air travel globally if very much booming.

DC3 Dave

That is, as you say, a discussion for another place.

I think it fits into here, Thread is "Coronavirus Impact on Air Travel".

Post Covid world it may be different as the old Capitalist model is gone. The total subsidising of industries and people since March has shown that. Govts have borrowed like crazy that will never be repaid. It will refocus political thought and action quite possibly at the expense of aviation.

Aviation has good points in it brought in £4 billion a year in APD, millions of tourists spending billions But it also allows UK residents to go overseas spending billions, it is not in the eyes of climate group "green".

A green agenda coupled with the mega recession to follow may result in UK Govt deciding that London is best served by 3 key airports in Greater London Area, one in the South, one in the West and one in the North East. All others closed and retasked to housing or something else.

There isn't a plan for post Covid aviation but if anybody thinks it will be the same as pre Covid then good luck with that idea. We really are in unchartered skies.

So not a glass half full kind of guy, then?

Nut job more like!

He has no more idea than the rest of us what’s going to happen next. Capitalism has survived much worse than covid.

So only a few scheduled carriers will survive?

Depends on the situation but a year ago i was in Tenerife when Covid first started hitting the news media, if anybody suggested that Govt would be paying wages for massive areas of the economy, full lockdown for months on end, aviation shuttered, with unparalleled borrowing then a reminder would have been that Bojo won the recent election. Hell if anybody suggested that in Tenerife I would have taken the glass and sniffed what was inside.

Looking at Govt suggestions that council tax gets replaced with a % property tax is not a Tory idea. Think the unthinkable on Aviation, you may not be right but the old ways have changed and Covid / Climate change will be used.

In 2019 UK tourists spend £62 Billion abroad, where as overseas visitors spent £28 billion in UK. It is not unsurprising that Govt would want UK residents to spend money in UK.

Took me a few readings to get that :)

One factor which we need to keep in mind regarding future demand for airport capacity is that the key metric for runways required is the number of aircraft movements. It is so easy to focus solely on passenger throughput stats. Taking the example of LGW, we may find that the runway there quickly returns to a 'fully subscribed' status but with a far greater emphasis on A320/A321/B738 no-frills ops at the expense of higher-capacity widebodied long-haul ops. Also, increased demand for executive charter as business travellers and HNWI's wishing to avoid crowded airliners could result in greater demand for runway slots at gateways such as LTN, SEN, STN, FAB, BQH and others. Whilst overall passenger throughput may face a substantial drop from 2019 levels for a number of years, the fall in demand for runway access may be rather less pronounced. We need to factor in a changing traffic mix in terms of a resurgence of smaller types using runways, rather than to presume that movements and passenger throughput stats will fall in lockstep.

Dannyboy39

...totally agree....aviation will return....the genie was taken out of this bottle years ago...

I never said it will disappear but it will become more constrained for various reasons including lingering Covid that will last years in many parts of the world in high numbers. If anyone thinks long haul is going to bounce back anytime soon it isn’t going to happen. Already Australia has said it will keep its borders closed for 2021.

Germany are now reporting a brand new mutant strain so I wouldn’t be booking that summer holiday just yet as we know how the Germans also like their summer holidays on the Med. There are bound to be other strains coming along in the coming months so there is no certainty as to when we will be set free again to travel the world although I hope for the best.

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-01-1...66I/index.html

There are over 4000 different mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Mutations are nothing new. The issue at the moment is that transmission is high so a vaccine resistant (which none of these mutations are) "could" come in and take advantage of the high transmission rate to spread quickly.

Once transmission is reduced, which would happen in the summer months with or without a vaccine, a new vaccine resistant mutation could not come in and spread quickly. This gives time for vaccines to be tweaked to combat the new variant.

Once a large section of the population is vaccinated then transmission will be reduced and again a new variation could not come in and spread quickly, again giving the vaccine time to be tweaked.

The SARS-Cov-2 virus is going nowhere, and will be come endemic in the human population. It will continue to kill people for decades to come, and people will be required to be vaccinated probably every year like flu.

We will just get on with life.

But as for travel, I think this summer will happen. Just probably not until the summer.

racedo

Or uncharted skies? Expect something to surface from the highly-influential World Economic Forum (virtual) meeting next week and preparing for Davos in the spring. A lot of insights can be found on the WEF website. Consider:-

"How we can build back better"

"COVID-19 has prompted much reflection about our relationship with the planet. Advocates for more sustainable tourism are hoping the coming years will lead to a rethink of international travel, with more innovation and a renewed commitment to addressing climate change and crisis management. However, the likely reality is that destinations will be desperate for economic recovery and will compete vigorously for tourism dollars when borders reopen. So, if consumer behaviour trends are anything to go by, the new normal might not be too dissimilar from the old. It’s doubtful, for example, that we would tolerate flying less when travel is proven safe again. This doesn’t bode well for the planet. If international travel is going to “build back better”, communities, governments and the global tourism industry must come up with a transformative plan that is workable and helps drive traveller behaviour change and decarbonisation. The pandemic has given us a chance for a reset — we should make the most of the opportunity."

To understand more simply look at "The Great Reset" which Covid-19 has given a great opportunity to pursue. We can't escape the "climate change" implications highlighted. The full relevant article is:-
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/...ravel-tourism/

Gurnard

Good point. However WEF is viewed by many as rich millionaires, deciding what the little people will be allowed to do, while the wealthy seek to acquire more power and control. Carbon footprint of jets going to WEF never seems to be taken into consideration.

Climate change is a 1st world issue, many acrosss the world worrying about access to education and food do not have the time to worry about climate change, their basic needs come first. Discussions with teenagers and reminding them that their Primark clothes and Iphones come from people often poorly paid is not something they wish to know as it goes against the message they bombarded with.

Tourism is cheap industry, Ryanair (other airlines are available) bringing 250,000 inbound passengers a year to Carcasonne (other cities are available) provides more economic benefit to the region that French Govt investing €50 M. Assumming a spend per passenger locally of €200 each that is €50M but the multiplier is greater as passengers will use local accommodation, local businesses and local services which provides jobs.

Currently mandated minimum annual leave requirements may be looked at, at least in private sector and people encouraged to take longer breaks in an area. It is not surprising when talking to people in private sector that offering more leave V pay rise there are many people who would happily opt for more leave.

It can be done as Benidorm eliminated the cheap beach front properties or 60's and 70's to eliminate the cheap and nasty image and go for more value added tourists.

Ultimately it depends on which stanch governments want to adopt, taxing holidays may generate more cash BUT telling people they cannot spend their money as they wish is not something that will have high popularity.

Aviation is going to be challenged as never before BUT tourism is a big job creator and turning it off to suit agendas may sound greater to school kids who then get told that their 2 week holiday to Spain is off because of it and 6 weeks in UK is what summer holidays are. The future of aviation is not written but aviation will need people to fight its case.

Travel is one of the biggest eye openers for any individual .. other cultures , other climates and environments.. by all means shut it off for the plebs, but expect them to react accordingly..
naturally the upper echelons will still be traversing the globe

Well the rich half of society just got a hell of a lot richer, and the poor side poorer. I've no doubt that one day capitalism will eat itself, but for the foreseeable future that rich half will probably enjoy more holidays than they were before. The poor half will clamouring for whatever jobs they can get which can't be achieved by automation or the internet, so they'll be glad to service the holidays of the rich half.

Aviation should prosper short-term. It needs to act responsibly and work towards cleaner ways of producing the energy required to fly though.