According to a study carried out by Holiday Extras, 12% of the UK?s most popular holiday destinations have already announced that they will be opening for British tourists by July. Another 50% are expected to open up by the end of the year
Holiday Extras has been closely analysing data and government announcements to build its own Holiday Extras Deckchair Index, which will be released every fortnight. It will allow British travellers to see which destinations are preparing to open or available for British tourists after the lockdown.
The index, which will start from July, currently stands at 12% - which denotes that 12% of the nation?s favourite holiday destinations, including Italy (June) and Greece (July), Mexico, The Maldives and Iceland (June too) will be open to travellers by this summer.
Ant Clarke Cowell, associate brand director at Holiday Extras, explains: ?Every day we review what is being said by the tourism ministers and the travel industry experts in all of our major markets. We are not just reading the UK travel news, but running news search algorithms over newspapers, from all over the world, especially in places like Spain, Italy, Turkey, Cyprus and Italy, where we all like to go. We combine that with the Office of National Statistics? data on where we flew in 2018 (the last full year which has data records available); taking the percentage of trips that went to a country as the index number. That is how we get an index of 12% for July ? majority of the trips were in Spain, which accounts for almost 22% of UK holidays, but there is another 6% from Italy (opening to tourism on June 3), Iceland (June 15), The Maldives (July) and Mexico.?
"We called it the Deckchair Index because we know that lounging on the beach is what we and our customers are most looking forward to, once the lockdown is over. Looking at the graph itself, we were delighted to see that the data wants to recline!? shared Cowell. ?For the next two months, the picture is clear. But as soon as you look further out, the less certain you become. Looking ahead to September and October, there are plenty of places that will be open up by then, and are just waiting for the UK?s coronavirus numbers to go down. So we are confident that British holidaymakers, who want to spend a week or two on a deckchair in the sun, will have plenty of choice.?
For more information, visit www.holidayextras.com.
Image credit: Andrew Price/Flickr
