Are Britons finally ditching long-haul trips for a stay-at-home summer?

Britons’ enthusiasm for staycations shows no signs of abating this summer, UK tour operators have said, despite a increase in flight bookings after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Some 44% of hotel rooms in Cumbria, home to the scenic Lake District, are already booked up to the end of August, up from 36% this time last year, according to analytics group STR, which compiles data that they cover three-fifths of hotel rooms in the UK.

In Devon and Cornwall, both hot spots for bathers, 55% of rooms were booked, from 52% in 2022.

Sykes Holiday Cottages, one of the UK’s leading holiday rental agencies, has increased its holiday rental listings by 15% to over 21,000 this summer in anticipation of additional demand. But the company, which also operates in Ireland, expects employment to remain stable compared to last year, peaking at around 90% in July, when most schools in England are closed.

Other hotel groups and holiday parks are avoiding big price hikes – and in some cases offering cut-price deals – in a bid to get people keen to go abroad to consider staying in the UK, or to take a second, smaller domestic summer vacation.

“For many people it’s not a vacation unless they’re at the airport. But more and more people, especially families, are at least entertaining the idea of ​​a stay,” said Malcolm Bell, chairman of Visit Cornwall, the local tourism board. He added that the ease of budgeting and the more heat have helped to convince customers to spend their holidays at home.

Paul Flaum, chief executive of holiday park operator Bourne Leisure, said the cost-of-living crisis meant ‘guests don’t just want value for money, they want certainty and to make sure every penny spent is worth it’. . It expects to accommodate 3 million people this year at the company’s 39 Haven Holiday trailer parks nationwide, up from 2.5 million last year.

“One trend that the pandemic has cemented is that people have realized how important it is to get away, and so they are doing everything they can to protect their vacations, but also to have more vacations,” Flaum added.

However, with even more international flight routes opening up this summer and little indication of the chaos that gripped airports struggling to restart normal operations last year, the UK’s tourism sector faces stiffer competition from overseas destinations.

Flight bookings departing between June and August were up 9% from last year and just 6% below the 2019 pre-pandemic benchmark, according to flight data aggregator ForwardKeys. In the peak summer period, low-cost airline easyJet will have 28% more capacity on its flights than in 2019.

“We don’t have a captive audience like there used to be,” said Tom Jenkins, president of the Tourism Alliance, an industry body. “We are still looking at a swinging pattern of supply and demand. . . If there are people who have realized, ‘We actually preferred to go there [the UK seaside town of] Mablethorpe rather than the Costa del Sol’, which takes time to filter.”

Despite leasing a record number of properties, Sykes Cottages expects to generate approximately 10% less revenue per vacation rental this summer than it will in 2022, in order to remain price competitive.

Nearly two-fifths of Britons are more likely to take a domestic holiday in the next six months than last year, according to a survey of 1,755 holidaymakers by the official tourist board VisitBritain in May.

Of those planning a domestic holiday before the end of 2023, 56% said it was because UK holidays were easier to plan, 46% because it involved less travel and 45% because a stay was more affordable.

After last year’s travel chaos, Jenkins hinted that the prospect of 31-day strike by thousands of security personnel at Heathrow, the UK’s main airport hub, between late June and late August could also dissuade people from booking overseas getaways.

Wherever they go, however, Britons are cutting back on extra spending on hospitality, shopping and holiday-related activities. Bell of Visit Cornwall said that while “during the Covid years, people were like ‘I want to and what’s the price anyway?’ now look at the price column first.”

Last month, cleaners working across tour operator Classic Cottages’ 1,400 properties, mainly in Cornwall, reported having to clean more ovens than usual – an indication that guests taking advantage of the mid-term school break have decided not to dine out, according to management director Dan Harrison.

His comments were echoed by Gill Haigh, chief executive of Cumbria Tourism, who said visitors ‘didn’t go all out in the way of three course meals and coffees’ but ‘choose self-catering or if they go to restaurants. . . be a little more selective”.

Harrison also pointed out that guests are booking at less notice than before, likely in an effort to maximize flexibility and hunt for last-minute deals, a trend also observed by Sykes Cottages, which said a third of bookings at half of the term was completed within four weeks of starting, compared to just a fifth in 2019.

But with a nationwide heatwave expected in June, tour operators believe the biggest boost to the UK tourism sector this summer will be continued high temperatures.

“When the weather is good, domestic travel is fine,” said Graham Donoghue, managing director of Sykes Cottages. “It’s pretty simple us Brits: when it’s sunny, we look out the window and think ‘Aha, time to book a holiday’.”

Additional reporting by Robert Wright and Alan Smith in London