Dip your toe into 2021

Look beyond this month’s lockdown restrictions and there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful about holiday options for next year, as Chris Leadbeater reveals. Plus 21 trips to book now!

In ordinary times, suggesting that a four-decades-old comedy ditty that rounded out a bawdy biblical pastiche is an appropriate theme tune for the current year would seem a strange idea. But then, 2020 is a strange year, and there is something about “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” – as seen at the end of Monty Python’s Life Of Brian in 1979 – that suits our present tension. “When you’re chewing on life’s gristle, don’t grumble, give a whistle” is a nice slice of optimism.

Of course, optimism has been in short supply for travellers and the travel industry in recent months. Borders have closed, quarantine windows have been imposed, and a grand pause has shuttered parts of the UK. Although the national lockdown that began in England on Thursday will nominally finish on Dec 2, while the firebreak lockdown in Wales is set to end on Monday, it seems unlikely there will be further holidaymaking in 2020. A grim year will achieve a grounded conclusion.

But what of up-and-coming 2021? A new year? Well yes, obviously. A clean slate? Probably not, if we are realistic. A reason to be hopeful of both an improvement to life in general and the chances of a proper getaway to foreign shores? More than you may think.

“We saw some green shoots when the travel corridors to the Maldives and the Canaries were restored last month,” says Erin Johnson of luxury beachbreak experts Sovereign (sovereign. com). “We even had last-minute bookings when the second lockdown was announced – including a 28-day trip to Tenerife.”

This note of positivity is echoed by Michelle Ventre at hiking and biking specialists Headwater (headwater.com).

“Before the latest lockdown, our selfguided walking and cycling programmes in the UK were doing very well,” she explains. “The revived travel corridors had also stimulated bookings in Europe – we saw a huge increase in interest in hiking in the Canaries two weeks ago. I expect this to continue when lockdown is eased.”

This belief in travel’s durability reaches up to the most gilded corners of the industry. “I am very confident that leisure travel will go back to a robust