May, June and July demand increases as confidence in the travel restart rises
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Icelolly.com Pulse: Search up for summer sun but bookers await the green light
Early signs of confidence that summer travel will be possible to popular beach destinations has been seen in icelolly.com search data this week.
With the government announcing its traffic lights systems for destinations and the Global Travel Taskforce reporting, 2021 departure months saw increases in demand.
The weekly Pulse report from icelolly.com found May, June and July all saw increases in searches, despite little likelihood of a wholesale return to travel before late July.
Chris Webber, icelolly.com head of travel deals said: “Following the government announcement on Easter Monday, we’ve seen a shift in search share to earlier summer 2021 with May, June and July all seeing increases.
“The biggest increase for all those months was for May travel – Antalya, Tenerife and Costa Blanca are the most-searched for those May departures.
“While there has been an increase in both searches and bookings, there’s not been a notable big spike yet – it’s likely the majority of people are still waiting to know the countries that will start on green when travel restarts.
“From a UK perspective, we’re seeing increasing search share for non-beach destinations with Lake District and Peak District searches on the rise.”
The Pulse report noted few notable changes in destination search share this week.
Corfu was the biggest share gainer in the top 10, while Madeira down in 28th saw the only really big increase of over 60%. Egypt, Kos and Amsterdam all saw 25% search share falls.
For domestic destinations, more rural spots gained search share with the Lake District and Peak District picking up share as Cornwall, Devon and Dorset lost share.
Generic country-level search share bounced back, icelolly.com saying this could be a sign of people being less selective about their destination with supply struggling to meet demand.
Searches for both the 31 to 90 and 91 to 180 day booking windows took much bigger shares this week. In the former there was a peak that covers the May half term week.
Contrary to this family trend, there was a peak in searches for the week of September 6, which will be the first week back at school after the summer holidays.
