In recent weeks, Britons who have planned trips abroad have been faced with lengthy airport queues, last-minute changes to their flights, cancellations and ruined holidays. As a result, experts are warning that many Brits will be choosing to have staycations this summer, rather than risk travelling abroad.
Adrian Murdock, co-founder of hotel room bidding platform Hoo, said holidaymakers were paying the price for the industry’s failure to pre-empt a boom in demand following a widespread lifting of restrictions.
He said: “The latest disruptions to foreign travel will have undoubtedly dented consumer confidence when it comes to booking holidays this year. As a result, we can expect to see many holidaymakers continue to opt for the convenience and certainty of a UK staycation over the potentially problematic endeavour of travelling abroad.”
Members of one such family that has experienced this chaos have shared their experiences trying to return back to Scotland from Australia. Ben Newbon, 36, his wife and their two young children had spent two weeks abroad to celebrate his sister's wedding, which had been postponed due to the pandemic.
Speaking to Edinburgh Live earlier this week, Ben has shared that the family had been travelling for nearly four days after getting caught up in a series of travel chaos as they tried to get home from Sydney. He explained they should have arrived back home on Sunday morning (April 24), but were now hopefully returning on Tuesday afternoon, adding an extra two days onto their journey time.
The chaos began before they "even left Sydney". According to Ben, his family was scheduled to stop in both Singapore and Amsterdam, yet were told that their Singapore connection was delayed. This would mean that they would miss the following flight.
"Before we had even left Sydney we got told that our flight from Singapore was delayed by three hours so that we would miss our connecting flight to Amsterdam," Ben explained. "But then we got a message to say as we would miss our flight we had been booked on a different KLM one that would give us two hours between the flights.
"Usually that would be fine but we were travelling with an 11-month-old baby and a three year old, so once we had managed to get off the plane, get the buggy, get everyone to the toilet and change nappies we came out and no one was there to help us on where to go."
Huge queues and a lack of information in Amsterdam meant they were quickly stranded in the Netherlands. Ben described the experience as "super stressful".
"Amsterdam airport is huge and confusing, there weren't any signs and we actually ended up leaving the airport instead of going to the transfers area, at this point we'd already been travelling for over 24 hours.
"We then had to join an enormous queue to get back into the building, which we could tell was going to be over two hours long. Of course we missed out flight and then got told we had to join another huge two hour queue to get rebooked."
Now desperately trying to get back to Edinburgh, the rebooking queue closed two hours into their wait, with the family told to find somewhere to stay in Amsterdam. Severely exhausted and jet-lagged, Ben explained they were able to stay with family, but have now needed to book the ferry to Newcastle, as well as a final train back up the east coast to Edinburgh.
He added: "We stood in that queue for ages and then that queue closed and we got told we would need to find somewhere else to stay for the night and would get reimbursed. Luckily my brother, who we were in Sydney with, has a house in Amsterdam and we were able to go there and get some sleep. We were incredibly lucky as there were so many people in that queue who wouldn't have that option.
"I've done a lot of travelling in my younger years before I had my family and I've never experienced anything like this before. You see images of things like this on the news but you never think it's going to happen to you.
"I had originally booked to go back to work on Wednesday so will now have to go straight into it, as we didn't think it would be this super stressful."
With similar scenes of chaotic airports appearing all over the UK and the rest of the world as international travel returns, Ben said they had received no real assistance or help, despite travelling with young children.
He said: "The kids hadn't slept for most of the flight either, and of course we had a lot of hand baggage as you do and my three year old had been crying and then eventually fell asleep on the bags, so we had to carry them through this queue as well as all our bags.
"I think the worst thing is that there was really no staff who could help us, we tried to explain we had the baby and a toddler and was there a way we could be prioritised but they just said we were in the same boat as everyone else. Other passengers were amazing though and helped us move all of our stuff along the queue, but the lack of help was horrendous.
"There were no flights available until Tuesday when we were first in the queue, so we have had to book the ferry to Newcastle out of our own pocket and then get the train back up to Edinburgh."
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