Holidays - Here we don’t...

[DadAManger]

We are back to where we always feared we would be (again). No more holidays in Portugal. The rest of the green list is a washout, where we aren’t welcome in Singapore or Australia anyway. Now we have a new `Vietnam Variant’ and new “Nepal Variant’ - and we kept the air border with India opened far too long and now we have a spike. Where on earth do we go from here? Skegness again.

Is the Government being reasonable?

UK holidays this year for all but the bravest and wealthiest I think.

Annoying but, unless you are trying to travel to see family, not devastating I wouldn't have thought.

Other counties will do the job for our government. Many already are... restricting entry from the UK. Including Germany, France, Japan, and America.

We are the higher risk country in many cases.

Vietnam's borders are shut.

Extremely limited travel only - like diplomats. The hybrid strain they've discovered must've been a quarantine leak - and they've immediately taken swift action to prevent a spread.

The different approaches are stark.

Our borders have been mostly wide open with very little real quarantine.
We have at least 130,000 dead.

Vietnam tightly shut borders.
They have a total of under 50 dead.

Uk for us this year, I’m excited to try different holidays from my usual ones.

There's a very big difference between discovering a few cases of a variant strain, and letting it spread.

We let it spread - the Alpha strain (formerly known as the Kent/UK strain).

Vietnam, on the other hand, are taking measures to contain.

It is ALMOST as though we are in a pandemic or something

I've worked in travel all of my life and it's worse now than at anytime since March 2020. My colleagues and I are all hanging on to our sanity (and in some cases our homes) by a thread.

Last year was 'batten down the hatches and ride out the year'. The start of this year was 'vaccines will save us' and now the reserves have run out, we're still refunding hand over fist and we can't confidently sell anyone anything (including our product within the British Isles, with the new lockdowns by stealth).

I'm utterly exhausted, haven't seen any of my own family in nearly 2 years and can no longer see any light at the end of the tunnel. It's really shit.

I'm sorry to hear that you and your industry are struggling stealth. Of course people are aware of the impact on the travel industry, but it is still sad to hear your individual story. I hope that things improve for all of us soon.

We are pretty much letting anyone in but we can’t get out.
No holidays aren’t important in the grand scheme of things but I’m starting to feel really trapped.
I don’t want to go to bloody centre parcs, Skegness or Cornwall .
Makes it worse when I see how normal the USA looks now and we’re no further forward.
It’s like a bloody plague island.

We were hoping to go to Aus/NZ early next year (was originally early this year) but it’s looking increasingly unlikely.

It sucks. I like holidaying in the UK but I like going abroad to see new cultures, food, different types of weather and scenery. I keep moving my foreign holidays on, hopefully helping the travel industry by not requesting refunds but I'm scared for the industry.

Honestly... To me you are safer in apartments on the Greek Islands, Malta or balerics eating outside, spending time on the beach etc than you are in the UK doing many of the things you are now allowed to do indoors.
Yes the plane has risks but so does going on a bus or train in the UK.
Malta has a lower covid rate than us and more vaccinated so why are we not allowed to go...especially if we ourselves have been double vaccinated.
In reality this is all very political... Its not just based on the science... They are willing for us to do higher risk things in the UK than go and spend our money abroad doing what is actually safer activities.

We normally try and go abroad every year, even managed to sneak off to Corfu last august, but I’ve given up hope for this year.

I’ve just decided to go a couple of weekends away and more expensive days out to theme parks etc with my teens than I normally would. It won’t hurt us for a year.

I feel for anyone who works in the travel industry though. This must be an absolute nightmare.

It’s bloody ridiculous. The people demanding we all holiday in the uk are the same ones waving pictures of packed parks and beaches and screeching about third waves. People are bing turned away from beaches, holiday accommodation is fully booked, and tripled in price and restaurants are packed.

And the “holidays aren’t essential” crowd can fuck off as well. Maybe holidays aren’t essential to those that have spent the last year or so on furlough, or working from home in their nice comfy homes with big gardens. They are bloody essential for those of us that have kept the country going this last year.

I think where the government have been unreasonable is in getting people's hopes up constantly and then having to put restrictions back in. Most people I know decided not to do a foreign holiday this year, it would have been better to encourage this and then it could have been a nice surprise if things opened up.

It's not just about what's safe for us as individuals, it's about other countries with lower vaccination rates not wanting to let the new variants get a foothold there, and unfortunately we are a leading source of those variants.

I really feel for those who work in the travel industry.

But I also agree we need restrictions, it’s shit but we are at such a delicate point in the whole process now that we need to do what is needed to help control it (which we should have done more from the off but that’s a whole different thread!)

Most countries have some sort of redirections on travel in for the same reasons. France have just increased their restrictions on travel from the U.K. because of the Indian variant

In reality this is all very political... Its not just based on the science... They are willing for us to do higher risk things in the UK than go and spend our money abroad doing what is actually safer activities

People keep saying things like this but I'm not sure that it's the case. The reality is that there simply isn't the capacity for everyone in the UK to holiday in the UK in the summer. Just look at what happens in coastal areas on a sunny weekend, or any other tourist spot. It's beyond full, you can't get near the place. There's a limit to how much money they can take. They can pretty much charge what they like and they'll be still full.

Plus many people, if they can't go abroad, they won't bother, because if the choice is a UK holiday at a stupid price, plus high priced food and drink, parking and attraction costs on top, will simply choose to stay at home and maybe have day trips and sit in the garden.

Because why would you spend thousands when the weather is so unpredictable and if you get poor weather, you'll likely spend a lot of time in a different property that you've paid a lot of money for, doing pretty much the same as what you could do at home for free.

@ImInStealthMode sorry to hear how you're feeling. I also work in travel and I've never known the industry feeling so defeated. I'm lucky to be employed by a reasonably financially secure company and so far we've made no redundancies (we're being propped up by a non travel division), but so many friends and colleagues are struggling now, not just financially but mentally.
I think most of us would understand if the government said no travel until 2022 then had a support plan in place to help the industry, but this constant last minute decision making is impossible to manage. Agents and operators have spent the last few weeks making bookings to Portugal and are now going to spend the next few weeks cancelling them, for no money. We're now at 18 months of no income - refunds for overseas holidays massively overshadow any small gains made selling UK holidays.
If this carries on much longer there'll be hardly any industry left and we'll all pay the price when travel resumes and demand massively outstrips supply.

And the “holidays aren’t essential” crowd can fuck off as well. Maybe holidays aren’t essential to those that have spent the last year or so on furlough, or working from home in their nice comfy homes with big gardens. They are bloody essential for those of us that have kept the country going this last year.

Absolutely this

It’s bloody ridiculous. The people demanding we all holiday in the uk are the same ones waving pictures of packed parks and beaches and screeching about third waves. People are bing turned away from beaches, holiday accommodation is fully booked, and tripled in price and restaurants are packed

I agree completely with this

I am in the aviation industry. The work chat rooms after the latest travel list announcements have been full of defeated and deflated staff anticipating that with a second summer without overseas travel many thousands more will be made redundant and more airlines will collapse. The costs involved in standing aircraft and crew up for anticipated travel are huge, and it can’t be done overnight, it takes time. For those crews and aircraft to be stood back down again is costly, and yet they have to be ready to claw back every penny they can in order to stay in business. In the job I do, every month we are rostered pie-in-the-sky rosters in the hope that travel will resume to those places that month, only for most of the routes to be cancelled again.

If this continues much longer, people will not be able to go on holiday because the travel
industry will be a fraction of the size it was, with all the experience gone.

It's all very convenient. Just as restrictions are about to be lifted, up pops another variant. Again!
Viruses mutate, they always have and always will.
Oh no, we're all going to die of Indian covid, but hey, let's keep the flights coming in each day..... we'll panic about it later, cos er, trade you know.
They built nightingale hospitals to deal with covid patients, but oh, there's not enough of them so we will close them again!
Meanwhile a lot more people are dying of cancer, other terminal illnesses and being run over on the roads than of bloody covid!!!

I think most of us would understand if the government said no travel until 2022 then had a support plan in place to help the industry

Yes exactly!

And also got creative about how to make holidays in the UK more desirable this year. Vouchers for travel, hire people to help keep areas clean, perhaps let people take their kids out of school a bit earlier so the travel window is bigger.

Things that should be done anyway given the environmental impact of travel.

We're going to see my family but have dual nationality.

And the “holidays aren’t essential” crowd can fuck off as well. Maybe holidays aren’t essential to those that have spent the last year or so on furlough, or working from home in their nice comfy homes with big gardens. They are bloody essential for those of us that have kept the country going this last year.

This.

It’s bloody ridiculous. The people demanding we all holiday in the uk are the same ones waving pictures of packed parks and beaches and screeching about third waves. People are bing turned away from beaches, holiday accommodation is fully booked, and tripled in price and restaurants are packed

And this.

Not staying here and getting ripped off. Fuck that.

@Tealightsandd

Other counties will do the job for our government. Many already are... restricting entry from the UK. Including Germany, France, Japan, and America.

We are the higher risk country in many cases.

Vietnam's borders are shut.

Extremely limited travel only - like diplomats. The hybrid strain they've discovered must've been a quarantine leak - and they've immediately taken swift action to prevent a spread.

The different approaches are stark.

Our borders have been mostly wide open with very little real quarantine.
We have at least 130,000 dead.

Vietnam tightly shut borders.
They have a total of under 50 dead.

america hast opened to Europe yet, so it's not anti British thing atm Japan hasn't opened to anyone neither only a few from their nearby countries

I’m more bothered about the fact that the hordes of tourists will arrive in my home town instead of going abroad and it will be another year like last where those of us who live here are pretty much housebound because we literally can’t move it’s so busy. It took two hours to make what should have been a ten minute journey last weekend and it’s only half term.