£650m a week cost of travel quarantine plan

Summer holidays facing wipeout

THE blanket two-week quarantine on travellers coming into the UK will blow a £650million hole in the economy every week it is in force, experts said last night.

The measure will wipe out the summer holiday season, which brings in £9billion in a normal year, resulting in tens of thousands of job losses, according to business leaders.

Tourism makes up around a tenth of the UK economy and supports jobs in hotels, cafes and restaurants, as well as theatres, shops and national parks.

Foreign visitors are already cancelling trips up to October rather than wait for the UK to sort things out, tourism chiefs said. Instead, many are looking to other countries who are more welcoming after reopening.

Industry leaders said the Government’s insistence that tourists spend two weeks in quarantine on arrival would ‘devastate’ the UK economy.

It comes as EasyJet announced yesterday that it planned to make 30 per cent of its workforce redundant, with 300 staff based at Glasgow and Edinburgh Airports in the firing line.

More than 90 per cent of

Britain’s summer tourism trade faces obliteration, according to the Centre for Economics and Business Research, one of Britain’s most respected independent forecasters.

Founder Douglas McWilliams said the overall cost of coronavirus to the travel industry could exceed £20billion, with nearly half of that coming in the months most under threat from the quarantine proposal.

Mr McWilliams said: ‘The peak summer months of July, August and September would bring in over £9billion from inbound tourism.

‘If the two-week blanket quarantine is enforced, this £9billion is likely to be reduced to just £0.5billion, costing the tourist industry £650million a week.’

The Scottish Passenger Agents’ Association called for the introduction of ‘air bridges’ so that travellers coming into the UK from countries with low coronavirus levels would be exempt from the quarantine. It said ‘the sector is already facing the loss of virtually the whole of the Scottish schools’ main holiday season already’.

Business leaders last night blasted the measures, due to come into force from June 8.

Close to 80 travel bosses have written to Home Secretary Priti Patel calling on her to ditch the ‘unworkable, ill-thought out and damaging’ plans immediately.