What the travel editors are booking

As government ministers clash over calls to abandon our annual summer break, nine seasoned travellers reveal their escape plans – and what they’ll do if lockdown thwarts them

Griff Rhys Jones Broadcaster and columnist

I have never been one to book far ahead. Every holiday I have ever taken has been a last-minute thing. I am much less pressurised these days but don’t shake off the habit of a lifetime. So I haven’t booked anything yet – but I never would.

Currently, I am really looking far forward to the excitement of a shave in three days’ time. And I might hang a picture next month. When friends ask me

“Are we sailing in the summer?”, I refer them to

Grant

Shapps…

For now, maybe we should stick to the UK. When

I was first sent out by the BBC to point at things, 30 years ago, I discovered that I lived in an explorer’s paradise. If you have never been to the Highlands of

Scotland or the Welsh Borders, or walked the Pennine Way or visited the highest cliffs in England in Yorkshire, or never stayed in a Landmark

Trust house, or discovered the pleasure of the seaside in Llandudno or Aberystwyth, this is surely the time to do that. Walk up Catbells.

Visit the art galleries of

Cardiff or Edinburgh.

And I know I am only saying this because I rent restored cottages on the Pembrokeshire

Coastal Path; I still have over 120 miles to finish.

The South China Sea is on hold for another year, alas.

Gill Charlton Telegraph Travel’s consumer correspondent

I’m not waiting until Grant Shapps tells me

I can book a holiday. Good tour operators are offering total flexibility. I’ve already reserved my place on a May walking-and-wine tour in the mountains of Catalonia with Wild Frontiers. If the trip is cancelled, I know I’ll be refunded promptly or can use the credit.

Last October, I took a gamble and went to see the great art in Florence and Rome without being jostled by tour groups. So this summer Venice, Prague and Amsterdam are high on my list. In November, I hope to be in India again. I will wait a little longer to book my hotels, but if the pandemic returns, I shan’t be asking for my deposits back. We all need to share the loss.

Nick Trend Telegraph Travel’s consumer editor

I have a sailing holiday in the Ionian Islands in Greece arranged for the second week in June. It was rolled over from last year when it was impossible to travel. I converted the BA flights into vouchers, but I haven’t rebooked them yet because I think the chances are only about 50/50 that we will be able to travel then.

I’m pretty confident that the flights won’t sell out any time soon, so I am waiting until after Easter before I make a decision – perhaps even later. By then, most people will have had jabs and we will know much more about the impact vaccination will have had on transmission, as well as how things are progressing in Greece.

Kathy Lette Novelist

Potty about Potter, my best buddy Sandi Toksvig and I are planning a stomp around the Lake District in Beatrix’s footsteps, staying in a coach house with a cottage holiday provider that has a flexible booking policy. Boasting England’s highest mountain and deepest, longest lakes, it’s no wonder Cumbria has stirred the imaginations of so many writers, poets and painters.

With its lush, sheep-dotted fields, mossy forests, little hobbit houses, Victorian follies, chocolate fudge and gliding swans on glassy waters, the Lake District is so quaintly picturesque and charming, it’s tempting to rename it the Twee-leries.

Stanley Johnson Environmentalist

When I was at school and university in the Fifties and early Sixties, my summer holidays were always spent on my parents’ farm on Exmoor.

Haymaking was usually fairly jolly, as least as far as my siblings and I were concerned, as long as we took care not to spike each other with our pitchforks.

Luckily, I’ve managed to hang on to the farm since my parents died 40 years go.

So that’s where I’ll be: in a deepsided river valley four miles from the nearest village, with herons and barn owls and loads of wild red deer. No booking needed.

Anthony Horowitz Novelist and columnist

I would love to be in Crete this summer – it’s where I’ve been every summer for the past nine years. The Greek government is desperate to have tourists back; their economy depends on it.

Sadly, however, Crete is currently experiencing a lockdown even more draconian than ours. So I’m more or less resigned to not going anywhere abroad. There may even be a stigma attached to international travel – at least for the time being.

I have one chink of light. My novel, Magpie Murders, is being filmed in Suffolk and I am actually taking part, so have to be on the set. I would happily spend the summer in Orford.

Mariella Frostrup Telegraph Travel columnist

Apparently, only the most foolish among us would book a family summer holiday – which marks me out as pretty silly indeed. A year stretching out without the punctuation of travel, near or far, is enough to sink me into the depths of despond. For the sake of my own mental buoyancy, I like not only to dream but make tangible, but cancellable, plans. British Airways has been efficient in issuing vouchers for trips cancelled, so I’ve gone crazy, accepted a dear friend’s optimistic invite to their Caribbean idyll and booked return flights to St Lucia in July. Whether we go or don’t go isn’t the most important thing. Family dinners since I booked the flights, where we’ve reminisced about past trips while working out what we most want to do on this one, has fired a flame in my teenager’s eyes that I am keen not to extinguish. It’s a reminder that travel isn’t simply about the journey, it’s about the dreaming, the planning, and the pure excitement the prospect of a trip can create.

My other booking, over Easter, is a house rental on the north coast of Devon. It’s slightly less likely to come off, but if it does, the thought of marching my loved ones along the South West Coast Path, in wind, rain, hail or sun, is just as enticing as our faraway fantasy.

William Sitwell Food writer and columnist

In a rash, crazy, reckless bid for freedom, we have planned our escape, our tunnel under the wire. The place is Aldeburgh in Suffolk; a July week of early morning swims off a shingle beach that keeps the masses at bay, breakfasts in the Brudenell Hotel with my wife and two smallest children, sips of Fishers gin at their distillery by the ocean, yoga with local guru Kitty, Indian dinners at Sea Spice, fish and chips on the high street, the best bacon in the world from Salter & King, lobsters and sourdough further afield in Orford from Pinney’s and the Pump Street bakery. And a pint in town at the White Hart Inn.

All of which, by then, might merit a jail sentence, but it’ll keep me dreaming meanwhile.

Claire Irvin Head of Telegraph Travel

In some kind of travel corridor miracle, I was one of the lucky ones who made it away before lockdown 3, so I’m not currently as sun-starved as most.

As such, I am following Telegraph Travel’s advice and holding my nerve on my next family holiday.

Instead, I’m ready to re-book cancelled trips from last year (Ibiza with friends, Sri Lanka with the family, horse safari in South Africa) if and when we can, and plan to explore potential new places to visit in the UK if we can’t.

British bolt-holes never fail to delight, so I’ll happily take my chances on availability when restrictions lift.