The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The bargain 1990s holiday may be making a comeback
Companies are laying on millions of extra packages for 2024. Is this the return of the cheap getaway, asks Greg Dickinson
Britain’s three biggest tour operators are laying on a record number of seats for 2024, paving the way for a package-holiday price war not seen since the days when Oasis and Blur were battling it out in the charts.
It has been a period of dramatic upheaval for our holiday providers. In 2019, two years after the failure of Monarch, we witnessed the collapse of a long-loved travel behemoth, Thomas Cook. Soon after came the pandemic, when we lost many more tour operators and airlines, including STA Travel, Shearings and Flybe.
This year our appetite for travel returned, and from the chaos a new “Big Three” of tour operators emerged: Tui, Jet2holidays and easyJet Holidays. Booking numbers were strong. After the chaos of the pandemic, the security of a package holiday has become more appealing than ever before, and holiday firms are gambling on the good times rolling on.
Earlier this month, Jet2holidays announced it was adding an extra 850,000 seats for the summer of 2024: up to 6.7 million in total. This cements the Leeds-based tour operator’s position as the UK’s biggest, and the true successor to Thomas Cook.
Tui, the UK’s second-biggest tour operator, has upped its 2024 capacity by 520,000 to 5.8 million. The European firm is focusing on the growth regions of Spain and Turkey and will add extra aircraft in regional hubs including Bournemouth, Bristol and Newcastle, among others.
But the tour operator growing the fastest is the young pretender, easyJet holidays, which launched in November 2019 (two months after the collapse of Thomas Cook) and will increase its offering by almost a million seats – up to 2.2 million – for summer 2024. “easyJet holidays continues to outperform,” a spokesperson said this week, as the firm reported record numbers.
Add it all up and what we see is a gamble from the “Big Three” to the tune of 2.36 million extra seats in 2024. Will it pay off? Not since the 1990s have we seen tour operators battle for market share on this scale. During this peak decade for package holidays, Thomson, First Choice and Thomas Cook vied to airdrop the largest number of suncream-drenched Britons into places such as Mallorca, Tenerife and Corfu. With holidays stacked high, prices remained low.
But budget airlines Ryanair and easyJet soon entered the scene. In its first year (1995), easyJet carried just 40,000 passengers, and Ryanair 2.3 million. By 2005, easyJet’s total was 30 million and Ryanair’s 33.4 million. They continue to grow, flying almost 250 million passengers between them in the last full normal year of travel, 2019, while Hungarian upstarts Wizz Air have also joined the pack.
With the rise of the low-cost carrier, British holidaymakers have grown used to cheaper flights. So, even after a buoyant year for travel, there is a cap on how much people will pay for a package holiday before they turn to hotel and flight comparison websites and book a DIY break themselves. For Tui, Jet2holidays and easyJet holidays to succeed, they know they have to get the price right.
And pricing will remain a key differentiator as the cost of living crisis drags into a second holiday season. A report by PwC and TTG shows that 15 per cent of people are cautious to spend more on their holiday next year, and 17 per cent are unsure as to when they will book.
A return of last-minute holidays would be a shift from how this year played out. In 2023, tour operators sold their wares early, meaning the cheapest months to book a summer holiday ended up being December and January. But with 2.2 million extra seats to sell, the UK’s “Big Three” may have no option but to drop prices at the last minute to shift their unsold holidays. Is it a sure thing? Definitely maybe.