The great summer holiday conundrum

To book or not to book, that is the question. And when? And where? Nick Trend helps navigate the way to a much-needed escape

One week Matt Hancock says he has arranged his break in Cornwall, the next Grant Shapps tells us we shouldn’t even think about booking – not even in the UK – and meanwhile Boris Johnson does his best to sit on the fence. Now, in desperation, the travel industry has launched a campaign, “Save Our Summer”, to try to persuade us to ignore government advice and book anyway.

Confused? Should we believe an industry that hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory when it comes to refunds, or put our trust in the politicians who, let’s face it, aren’t in control of the situation and know very little more than we do about what the future holds?

Travel is a two-way process, our fate is also in the hands of other countries, and currently, ministers are terrified of sparking another debacle like the U-turn over Christmas bubbles. They would love to be optimistic but not if it produces another potential foot-inmouth, “it would be inhuman to cancel summer holidays”, incident.

Either way, it leaves us in a bind. We know that there is huge pent-up demand for travel – after a year of restrictions; millions of us are desperate to get away for a week or two. And we know there are tempting deals out there. So, while it’s all very well being patient, the risk is that if we don’t book we may find that we either can’t get a holiday at all, or that prices have risen so much that we can’t afford to book it.

Many tour operators reported exceptionally high levels of summer bookings during January and even before that. I was talking to some villa operators about bookings recently. All said they had seen record demand. For example, Scott Williams had already sold half its holidays for summer 2021 by the end of last year. Bookings generally are dead at the moment, so that has depressed prices across the board. However, all that will change if there is a rush to book after lockdown.

So, you might think, the cunning thing would be to listen to the industry, ignore the government and book now anyway. But this is the great conundrum. If you do, you may find yourself reliving the nightmare of last year, when it wasn’t clear whether or not we would be able to travel until early July, and by the end of that month the doors were starting to slam shut again.

And, because booking conditions generally require that we pay in full for our holidays up to 12 weeks before departure, it seems highly likely that we will have to cough up before we know if we can actually travel. This was a