While the threatening reports that predict a debacle in the Mediterranean tourist destinations multiply due to the high temperatures that are being reached these days and the possibility that they become a summer constant, the truth is that in the short term it does not seem that the weather is harming the traditional tourism sector in destinations such as Benidorm and the Costa Blanca.
In fact, the rainy summer that the United Kingdom is experiencing had the opposite effect: last-minute bookings to travel to sun and beach destinations more than quadrupled, according to a report published yesterday by the prestigious BBC.
The source of the information disseminated by the British public channel is the Advantage Travel Partnership, which represents about 20% of the travel agencies in Great Britain. The BBC spoke to 11 major travel agencies and most had seen a surge in bookings during the rainy British summer.
Among the testimonies mentioned by the report, the hairdresser Kate Lodge, assured that “she will pay anything” for a vacation abroad. This woman from Eastbourne, a seaside resort town in south-west England, said she just wants a holiday where she and her son can soak up the sun, even though “cheap deals are hard to come by now.”
“But I don’t want to book free time for my holidays and it rains all week. I’m wearing winter clothes and we are in August. I don’t care what it takes, I’ll get on the plane,” he concluded.
A spokeswoman for the Advantage Travel Partnership told the BBC that 18% of bookings in the last month were for travel in August, a proportion much higher than the usual 4%. However, in June, when the UK experienced a brief heat wave, bookings for trips to southern Europe fell… only to rise again in the humid month of July.
A Jet2 airline spokesman said the rainy weather is attracting travelers who are more flexible than usual about their destination to their booking pages: “They just want to get away from this summer and trade British weather for sunshine, regardless of destination.” .
The truth is that there are not a few northern Spaniards who have been driven to do the same. As the local press published yesterday, the month of July ended in Cantabria, for example, with 189 hours of sunshine, quite a long way from the 281.6 hours of last year, which was a record in the Santander region.
For this reason, it is not surprising that hoteliers in Benidorm and the Costa Blanca, who have already exceeded 90% of reserved places for the August long weekend, calculate that overnight stays can still go up three more points, based on the significant increase in last-minute reservations compared to previous seasons, when trips were almost always planned with more time.
