The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Why where you live can limit your horizons
Greg Dickinson reveals the best and worst UK airports for determining holiday choices
Your holiday options vary greatly depending on where you live, new Telegraph research reveals, with Londoners enjoying more than double the non-stop flight options of people who live in Manchester, Edinburgh and Birmingham. The study, using data supplied by aviation analyst OAG, shows all the destinations you can reach from London compared with the 10 biggest regional airports, based on flight schedules for the summer of 2023 (note that several new routes announced for 2024 will change the picture slightly).
It reveals that London (across its five airports) provides holidaymakers with 373 choices for their summer destination, while Manchester offers 170, Edinburgh 134, Birmingham 118, Bristol 106, Glasgow 76, Newcastle 69, Leeds-Bradford 68, Nottingham 65, Liverpool 57 and Belfast 53.
There are no surprises that London, with four of the five biggest airports in the country, is better connected than anywhere else. However, the data exposes a clutch of surprising destinations that are still served only by the capital, and – on the flipside – some unlikely spots that are reachable from every corner of the country.
The destinations served by every airport
If you want to visit one of these 16 destinations, you shouldn’t have too much trouble, whether you live in Belfast, Glasgow or the East Midlands: they are accessible from London and all 10 of the regional airports covered in the study.
Three are on mainland Spain (Alicante, Barcelona, Malaga), five are Spanish islands (Fuerteventura, Ibiza, Lanzarote, Palma de Mallorca, Tenerife), while Antalya, Corfu, Faro, Jersey, Kos, Krakow, Malta and Paris make up the rest of the list.
The data solidifies what we already know: that Spain is by some margin our favourite holiday destination. In 2019, the last full “normal” year for travel before the pandemic, 18.1 million UK residents travelled there, while France received 10.3 million British holidaymakers and Italy 5.1 million.
The destinations you can reach only from London
There are a whopping 179 destinations that you can only reach from London airports. Some are to be expected (particularly long-haul destinations such as Tokyo, Japan and Perth, Australia) but there are others you would assume you could reach non-stop from at least one regional airport.
Let’s start with European cities. Biarritz, Ljubljana, Tallinn and Vilnius – all brilliant cities, well deserving of a weekend away – are reachable only from London airports. Others destinations that connect exclusively to the capital include Zaragoza, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Dortmund.
For a winter-sun island escape, the options are limited when you travel from beyond the M25. The Caribbean favourites of Antigua and St Lucia are accessible only from London’s big airports, and it is the same story for the Indian Ocean idylls of Mauritius and the Maldives.
Across the Atlantic, you can reach New York City, Orlando and Atlanta from London, Edinburgh and Manchester, while Washington D.C. and Chicago are accessible via London and Edinburgh. However, you can only get to Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin and Seattle direct from London. Virgin is relaunching its Manchester to Las Vegas route from June 2024.
The destinations that are surprisingly well connected – and less so
Verona (who knew?) has connections to London and all of the regional airports in our study except for Liverpool. The same number of major regional airports serve Rome, while fewer connect with Venice. Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, also has connections to eight of the 10 biggest regional airports, whereas only three serve Istanbul.
Looking to fly to Bergerac in central France? You’re in luck. Six of the regional airports in our study serve the town (more than the number with flights to Bordeaux). Other surprises in the list include Poznan (also with connections to six regional airports), Toulouse (four), Turin (four), Rzeszow (three) and Cluj Napoca (three).
As for the surprisingly poorly served destinations? Away from London, only two regional airports (Edinburgh and Manchester) offer flights to Vienna, one of Europe’s headline cities. Seville is also served only by those two regional airports, as is Helsinki – and Gibraltar can only be reached via Bristol and Manchester, as well as London airports.
The postcodes that are furthest from an international airport
In England, you are never too far away from an international airport. Live in central London and you have a choice of five within an hour on public transport. Live in Stoke-on-Trent and you are about an hour’s drive from Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and East Midlands airports.
One of the corners in the country that is furthest from an international airport is the Cumbrian coast, around Whitehaven, just to the west of the Lake District. From here, your closest airport is Newcastle, which is around 100 miles away – a journey of more than two hours by car. Some places in Scotland are particularly poorly connected to the wider world. The tip of the Mull of Galloway is a good twoand-a-half-hour drive from Glasgow Airport. Durness, in the remote northeast of the Highlands, is a similar drive away from its nearest airport, Inverness, as is John O’Groats. Grigadale is more than four hours from Glasgow and Inverness airports by car.
Residents along the Welsh coast have a trip on their hands, too. Those who live on the remote tip of the Llŷn Peninsula are more than two-and-ahalf hours from the closest airport (Liverpool or Manchester) while the drive from Aberystwyth to Cardiff, Liverpool and Birmingham airports will take you about three hours. And the most remote settlements of all? Those are along the Ardnamurchan peninsula in the Scottish Highlands.