Uncertainty over quarantine restrictions has led clients to scrap any remaining holiday plans for 2020, according to a leading agent.
Gemma Antrobus, managing director of Haslemere Travel and chair of Aito Specialist Agents, said countries being taken one and off the safe list with limited notice had extinguished most of her customers’ travel plans for this year.
“It just makes it really hard when you’ve got really interested clients who want to travel, but they look at it and go, ‘well, where can I go and how far ahead can I book? If I booked now for November, is there a chance that the regulations are going to change?’ And the answer is yes,” she said.
“You could book somewhere that’s off the list now and it could be on the list by November – or it might not be. Or you could book somewhere that’s on the list now, and then it goes off and it comes on again, and then it could go off again.”
Antrobus continued: “With all this uncertainty, my clients are now saying ‘right, let’s scrap 2020. And let’s think ahead to 2021’. So we’re looking at a lot more January and February winter sun departures for those that really haven’t been able to have anything this year.”
Charles Duncombe, director of Holidaysplease, likened quarantine rules to the “Scarlet Pimpernel”.
“It has dampened things massively because like the Scarlet Pimpernel, it could strike any time, any place, anywhere and your customers never quite know which country’s next on the hit list. They haven’t got time to be going down list of charts and Covid rates,” he said.
“And so, whenever any country gets called out and quarantines put in place, pretty much overnight, customers then think that could happen to any destination at any time. So we had really strong growth up until the end of July, but it has fallen away in August.”
Duncombe said that as at the end of July, Holidaysplease monthly revenue was only 6% down on July the previous year.
“Usually we’re looking for growth rather than a 6% contraction but I was delighted with that. We saw this trajectory and we thought it was going to continue but then we had the Spain announcement,” he added.
Tony Mann of Idle Travel described the situation as “frustrating” and “maddening”.
Mann, whose agency is in Bradford and has therefore been subject to local lockdown, said: “The bizarre thing to me is I can’t go to the gym that’s next door to me, but I can fly to Turkey or Greece to a hotel that’s got a gym. How crazy is that? So I’m saying to everybody ‘get yourself off to Greece, Turkey or Portugal, I’ll find you a hotel with a gym you can go to’.”