Agents have hailed continued strong sales as a sign the market could avoid the traditional price bloodbath in the lates market.
They have remained bullish about trading, with bookings up year on year and prices holding firm.
Idle Travel director Tony Mann said: “Sales are zooming by. You just keep thinking, how long will this go on?”
He said “good-value deals” were still available for clients flexible on dates, but stressed: “Gone are the days when you could get a £99 holiday.”
Sutton Travel managing director Andy Tomlinson agreed last-minute, cheap deals were “long gone”, making it unlikely this summer’s lates market would be flooded with offers to prompt a price war.
“You’d start to see pricing coming down if operators were worried about summer capacity because they’d rather sell at a half-decent price than dump prices at the last minute. I don’t think we’ll see much of that,” he said.
Fred Olsen Travel director of retail Paul Hardwick added: “Thankfully prices are not being reduced massively and [our] customers are not, in the main part, looking for cheap deals. They are demanding good value, but looking for high-end and, in a lot of cases, longer durations than normal.”
He also cited good availability “in most places”. More than a third of overall sales for the agency are for departures within three months.
Mann said the trade would resist a return to price dumping. “We [the industry] don’t want to go back to extremely cheap deals. We don’t want to give holidays away because it kills the early-booking market,” he said.
Travel Stop managing director Bridget Keevil said prices, and particularly airfares, were likely to stay high while demand was strong. “Airlines are filling planes; they don’t need to bring prices down,” she said.
But David Moon, head of business development at The Advantage Travel Partnership, predicted demand was likely to rise for cheap deals, with about 38% of the consortium’s bookings now for travel within 12 weeks.
“Budget-conscious consumers were not booking as much during peaks, so we are expecting to see those consumers return to the market during the lates season,” he said.
Agents highlighted that some of the cheapest offers currently available were for ex-UK cruises.
Moon said cruises, and value-for-money destinations such as Turkey, offered viable alternatives for clients seeking late deals as availability tightened and pushed up prices in hotspots such as mainland Spain and the Canaries.
He said: “Bookings to Turkey have improved over the last three weeks. This indicates consumer confidence is returning following the earthquakes earlier in the year.
“We’ve also seen some very competitive pricing in the cruise sector for couples and families, especially cruises departing from the UK where flight prices are not an issue. While a land-based holiday in a popular resort may not be viable for some, there are other types of holidays for consumers to consider.”
The upbeat reports came as easyJet also reported strong summer booking momentum. Its tour operator arm easyJet holidays is 88% sold for summer.
In a trading update for the six months to March 31, the airline forecast capacity for the peak summer three months would exceed pre‑pandemic levels by 8%.