Going on foreign holidays seems to be up there with Netflix subscriptions with boomers telling young people why they can't afford a house when the average one is 9 x average incomes. Back in the real world its usually cheaper to go abroad than holiday in UK even with higher travel costs. Even a cheap place on the South Coast is often twice as much as places to stay in the Med. Going on holiday to Cornwall for two weeks is a sign of wealth not financial prudence. If or when I have kids I might take them to the South Coast once or twice to experience places I went to as a child but it certainly wouldn't be to save money.
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The future of flying - Electric planes or bans on flying?
- Thread starter berneyarms
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Going on foreign holidays seems to be up there with Netflix subscriptions with boomers telling young people why they can't afford a house when the average one is 9 x average incomes. Back in the real world its usually cheaper to go abroad than holiday in UK even with higher travel costs. Even a cheap place on the South Coast is often twice as much as places to stay in the Med. Going on holiday to Cornwall for two weeks is a sign of wealth not financial prudence. If or when I have kids I might take them to the South Coast once or twice to experience places I went to as a child but it certainly wouldn't be to save money.
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Well if you don't mind I'm going to drink in some Balearic sunshine, local cuisine and culture. You can take North Wales and the rain...I'll be honest, I'd rather a bit of rain than 50 degrees.
To be honest, though, we did south west France by car every 2 years, Britain in the opposite year, and usually north Wales for weekend breaks. I don't look back and think we were done out of 2 weeks in Magaluf, I look back with happiness at enjoyable time together (give or take the odd argument about putting the caravan on the pitch).
The idea that people would be seriously disadvantaged by not being able to go to an all inclusive in Spain quite as often (or even a cultural experience if that's the preference) is just a bit laughable. The beauty of our own isles are so often overlooked.
Perhaps the reason started to going to Spain (and the rest of the world) was because the UK resorts were becoming dumps....
I used to enjoy going to Whitby for long weekends, especially around the Goth weekends. Then holiday home owners almost unilaterally realised they could fleece people by as much as double, leaving the cost of a cottage for the weekend more than flights, transfers and week long stay in Spain cheaper. Can't imagine why people would prefer that!
But it is a typically British business trait, make everything more expensive, more difficult then complain when people go elsewhere..
Well if you don't mind I'm going to drink in some Balearic sunshine, local cuisine and culture. You can take North Wales and the rain...
Perhaps the reason started to going to Spain (and the rest of the world) was because the UK resorts were becoming dumps....
I used to enjoy going to Whitby for long weekends, especially around the Goth weekends. Then holiday home owners almost unilaterally realised they could fleece people by as much as double, leaving the cost of a cottage for the weekend more than flights, transfers and week long stay in Spain cheaper. Can't imagine why people would prefer that!
But it is a typically British business trait, make everything more expensive, more difficult then complain when people go elsewhere..
Places like Whitby really need holiday lets to require planning permission. Many British tourist destinations would benefit from fewer tourists not more. We are more densely populated than most of Europe and its easier for our neighbours to cater to tourism because of this. There are still emerging destinations in Europe too. I went to Albania during the pandemic and their new airport will soon open up the south and centre of country to more tourism. It sounds like an odd tourist destination but its not when you look at the country properly. It has a huge Adriatic coastline, an interesting mix of cuisine and a lot of historic sites. The industry is essentially marketing itself as a cheap Italy. If we want an intergrated continent we should be accepting that as a densely populated country with a cold climate we are not going to be the most desriable place for long holidays.
I'm not going to get involved with this thread other than to say that this is not the case. There are people, in this very thread, who want to ban flying:
I consider this a fringe position, and one which has very little sympathy from governments across the spectrum, but it exists nonetheless.
Funnily enough I am giving serious consideration to Romania next year, specifically Transylvania!
But yeah, the holiday let market has wrecked some UK tourist spots, not just for cost but for strangling the life and character of many places.
I have never advocated the "ban all aviation" position. Why do you insist on refusing to engage with the "reduce aviation" position?
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
Tourist resorts in the UK are expensive because the overheads are expensive. Locals can’t live in these places and so there are no local staff, so wages rise to attract people. The places end up strangled by Air BnB.
You’re starting to see the same in places like Berlin and Amsterdam. Ibiza is staggeringly expensive.
But some of it is expectations. Look at the whole stag do industry. 20 years ago you’d have your stag do in your nearest big city, now you fly halfway across Europe on Ryanair to get hammered in Tallinn or Ljubljana instead.
It’s a tough situation. I love flying to new places- most people do. But the current situation simply isn’t sustainable. So unless aviation can become sustainable everyone- me included- will need to fly less or fly more sustainably. I still think the use of private jets needs to be robustly discouraged through very high arrival and departure taxes, paid on the aircraft not the passenger, and I would have no issue with APD for business class decreasing to assist in this.
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Extrapolating that position to say “everyone wants to ban flying”- and then proceed to argue against an outright ban rather than the nuanced position of reducing aviation- is simply debating in bad faith. But strawmen are always easier to argue against.
You’re starting to see the same in places like Berlin and Amsterdam. Ibiza is staggeringly expensive.
But some of it is expectations. Look at the whole stag do industry. 20 years ago you’d have your stag do in your nearest big city, now you fly halfway across Europe on Ryanair to get hammered in Tallinn or Ljubljana instead.
It’s a tough situation. I love flying to new places- most people do. But the current situation simply isn’t sustainable. So unless aviation can become sustainable everyone- me included- will need to fly less or fly more sustainably. I still think the use of private jets needs to be robustly discouraged through very high arrival and departure taxes, paid on the aircraft not the passenger, and I would have no issue with APD for business class decreasing to assist in this.
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You will find someone who will take up any fringe position.
Extrapolating that position to say “everyone wants to ban flying”- and then proceed to argue against an outright ban rather than the nuanced position of reducing aviation- is simply debating in bad faith. But strawmen are always easier to argue against.
Personally I find a holiday in Cornwall fairly cheap compared to overseas travel (although to be fair we stay with family, so a slightly unfair comparison!!!!)
Although I do agree with the comment about children not necessarily getting value or if things. Ours are happiest when they can spend time with their cousins. It being within the UK, means that only one of us needs to take time off work to take them to meet up.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
I don't really agree. In the end you know the big tourist honeypots. If you don't want to live in or visit one, don't. It's not like it's new.
What is new is Airbnb, and Scotland's plan to regulate this more tightly* so it doesn't adversely affect the housing market too much is probably overall good.
* Give or take that it technically applies also to some situations it probably shouldn't, such as house swaps or letting friends/family use your house while away, which is just a case of badly drafted legislation.
If all you go on holiday for is to sit on a beach slowly cooking and developing skin cancer, by all means. There are many types of holiday that aren't that.
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Camping is also very cheap. OK, some won't do that, but I've just spent a long weekend in Cornwall (Fri-Mon) and probably in total spent about £200-250 including train fare. That was just me to be fair, but the fuel by car would have been similar to the £80 train fare (2 Advances, one of them split, one of them through) and would have taken a whole family there.
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Didn't say anything about saving money, it's a hassle/rigmarole thing. Just CBA to take young kids abroad for zero enhancement of their or our holiday.
If I have children then their cousins will be in North America and Asia, them spending time together will have to involve flying by one side or both.
You seem to have a disorted view of European holidays. Yes some people do just drink in sun but many do more in addition to that. I mix the beach / pool relaxation with a lot of sightseeing to experience the history and culture of the countries I visit.
Many people don't want to spend their holidays in a tent in a country with extremely unreliable weather. If its raining or too hot then camping is an unpleasant experience for most people. Accomadation that has solid walls in UK is more expensive than in mainland Europe.
philosopher
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For a lot of types of holiday the UK is actually pretty good. For hiking / walking holidays, the UK is good, lots of hiking paths, good weather (you don’t want it hot for hiking) and fairly varied scenery. For camping / caravanning holidays I also think the UK is quite good due to the widespread availability of campsites and caravan parks.
Traditional sun, sea and sand type holidays in the UK are a bit hit and miss due to the unreliability of the weather. The UK is good for sightseeing holidays to an extent, but I can imagine if all your sightseeing holidays were in the UK, you would run out of interesting places to see after a while
For skiing holidays, the UK is not really viable as a destination, I know there are ski resorts in Scotland, but even in the current climate, the snow cover is too unreliable to risk booking a holiday there.
There’s really not many people who drive to Magaluf from the U.K.…
30-40 years ago perhaps. 20 years ago I’d already done half a dozen stag nights by flying somewhere in Europe, and none of them on Ryanair!!
I think perhaps this thread has a compressed view of the history of holidays abroad. I had my first trip to the Med in 1987, and I was comfortably the last person in my friendship group to ever have stepped on a plane for their summer holidays. And I was by no means in an affluent group of friends.
Flying to Spain / Greece / Portugal / Italy / south of France / etc for a week or two of sunshine was really quite common in the 80s (and well before - my mum, who basically grew up in abject poverty, had her first package holiday flying to the Costs Brava in 1964).
What has changed is the concept of the weekend trip abroad. This was essentially a product of the Maastricht treaty in 1992 and the freedoms from regulation granted to the airlines, and for EU nationals to reside where they liked in the bloc. Hence the development of European low cost airlines.
As a complete aside, but related, I’d be willing to bet that the average emissions per passenger on European short haul flights is less than half what it was in the 90s, with much more efficient aircraft, higher passenger capacity per aircraft, and much higher load factors per flight. Of course there’s around 4 times as many short haul passengers since then.
It depends on where you are able to get to and what interests you.
English Heritage and National Trust have a lot of locations and often have other things going on at then as well. For example English Heritage sometimes have jousting or ballista demonstrations.
For those interested in railways there a fair few heritage lines or mainlines which are worth visiting for the views.
We've discovered a company which does selg guided walks around towns and cities where they get you to look for things to get an answer, for example the last one we did was solving a murder by walking around Windsor. It got us off the beaten track, but picked up a few interesting things which you may not be aware of if you only went to Windsor Castle.
There's quite a range of niche museums, which can entertain for a day. Two we've done recently which were worth doing are the Black Country Living Musium and the Docklands Musium (the latter is free). TikToc can be a useful source of things to do (in that you can get a taste of what it's like, but the videos are quite short).
Often it's a case of knowing how to find out about stuff and you'll find that there's more than you expected. Obviously it's often easy to find the high cost things then the free, but the internet does help with that.
In the mid 00s I was one of two people in my form who didn't put their hand up when they were asked if they had flown. In my case it was because my Dad had a phobia of flying. I went to a state school in a normal area in the North of England.
These are all fairly niche things. The majority of people want to spend their holiday relaxing somewhere with good weather. Most will do a bit of cultural stuff too but the primary criteria is hot(ish) weather with low chance of rain.
Eurostar could only run 4 or 5 trains per week to the south of France prior to the pandemic and no one appears to be going for HS1 owner's push for a London - Bordeaux service. Another climate friendly option of ferries to northern Spain is not wildly popular with foot passengers.
That’s not particularly climate friendly compared to a couple of A321neos to Bilbao!
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Adding foot pax to ferries is generally pretty carbon neutral because the capacity for people is very high, the constraint is vehicles and the extra weight is trivial. But if you didn't have the cars, flying them there might indeed be better.
If they have the spare capacity for several hundred to a thousand foot passengers. Which, generally, they don’t. The most carbon friendly route to the Spanish north coast is the train, which is also somewhat quicker than the ferry, and will be quicker still when the Basque Y and even more so if RFF eventually build the LGV from Bordeaux to Dax.
If the pro flight ban people got their way, what would be the most envoironmentally friendly option for moving a million or two people between UK and Spain each year, assuming that rail capacity was maxed out? How bad are ferries and cruise ships?
I‘m going to answer that a different way, and say Rail.
2m people a year, each way, by Eurostar is 8 return trains a day at 75% load factor. That’s a long way short of available capacity.
Well for a start its going to be very difficult to to have a debate on that without dealing with both who you are going to restrict from flying, and how you deal with the economic consequences of fewer people travelling to countries that rely on the tourism industry, which is pretty much the same debate as how to deal with a full ban.
Secondly you have been dancing around the latter subject like a politician in front of a Parliamentary committee, which makes me wonder exactly why. Because from experience when challenged on such matters, I've generally found those in favour of total bans or severely curtailing flights tend not to want to deal with the awkward issue such policies would leave behind. Furthermore I'm pretty sure that most people realise that curtailing flying will end up involving some kind of taxes, increase in fares or a "credit" system, none of which will not regular flyers as they can afford those or will be able to circumnavigate them, leaving the lowest paid once again paying the price in not being able to travel as easily. So unless there's another way that both has minimal impact on economies around the world, and doesn't lead to what will be travel restrictions for those on lower incomes, then frankly there's little to debate that hasn't been already.
I've booked hotels in Cornwall a few times, and whilst they've not been rock bottom price, they've not been outrageously expensive either.
I tend to travel in the holiday "shoulder" peak.
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Indeed. It's the elite who do most of the flying that need to be made to cut down, but this will be in the "too difficult" box.
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DustyBin
Established Member
Without getting too hung up on the exact numbers, 2m people would mean a reduction of over 13m people versus last year. As you’re clearly better informed than I am, what is the actual available capacity?
There are of course other considerations that may see reduced demand. Cost is the most obvious, but some popular destinations would be difficult/time consuming to get to via land (and sea). The impact of this would be fairly devastating to certain areas I imagine.
Eight return trains a day would be a challenge with timings even if HS lines were built to Barcelona and Santander.
It would essentially require a shift towards the north east of Spain. Being cynical, that isn't a UK problem. What is a UK problem is that even with HS lines the north east of Spain and north of Italy will only just be in range of a daily return Eurostar journey. Before anyone says sleeper trains, @Bald Rick did an estimate for a London to Barcelona sleeper in a previous thread and it was eye wateringly expensive, I think about £500pp one way. Any Barcelona, Santander and Milan service would need to follow the pre pandemic south of France service. I.e. one return journey per day with reasonable fares. That isn't possible with current infrastructure but hopefully will be in the long term.
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DustyBin
Established Member
The other problem with international rail is that you need to get to London (usually) in the first instance. The cost for a family of four to get from Newcastle to London (for example) and back may well equal the cost of the return flight from Newcastle to Barcelona (for example). Overall, it's a completely different proposition, and unrealistic for some people.
Sleeper trains originating from UK cities and potentially linking with others across Europe might be a good, if somewhat niche market for some travellers who might be flying city to city. I'd even consider it for a couple of trips for the adventure, and I'm already thinking of doing a UK - Paris - Barcelona - Madrid - Malaga trip sometime, albeit with a cheap flight back.
But rail is not likely to be a full on replacement for most resorts in Western Europe for a very long time due to journey duration and cost. And it goes without saying it becomes even more of an issue headed for somewhere like the Greek Islands!
Its the same problem at both ends i.e. lack of current high speed infrastructure. There would need to be a HS1-HS2 link too. A "Crewe International" - Birmingham Interchange - Stratford International service wouldn't extend journey times excessively but that would still leave most of Wales, Scotland and parts of England out of reach. We are talking about massive amounts of infrastructure spending. Its stuff for the 2040s when the low hanging fruit of decarbonisation has gone.
The cost of an sleeper from UK to Europe is eye watering. Its simply not going to happen. We are talking about £100s of subsidy per passenger per journey and there aremuch better ways to spend transport budgets. HS sleepers in Europe won't happen either, this massively restricts range. The economics of the current very limited number of conventional sleepers from Brussels barely work.
I have never taken train to Spain but I have done long distance journeys to France and Germany on multiple occasions. Flying back is a good option if you have a job and therefore limited holiday time.
Tetchytyke
Veteran Member
I’d agree, and I’d also wager that Ryanair’s emissions per passenger km are lower than, say, BA’s, given the age of the respective fleets.
The problem, as you say, is the volume of traffic now.
Yes it is, DEFRA state a ferry foot passenger generates 19g/km emissions whilst it is 130g/km for a short haul flight. Even ferry travel as car+1 at 120g/km is better. Source.
From the same article:
It’s reasonable to assume that there are widely differing numbers!
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Oh I am in no way advocating this as a solution. If, as an example, short haul air travel to/from the U.K. was banned, the number of people travelling U.K.<>Spain each year would collapse to a small fraction of what it is now.
Actual capacity for a putative (say) London to Spain high speed service is an interesting question. But assuming the U.K. joined Schengen, and RFF finish their signalling / capacity upgrade of LGV SE and finish the high speed line from Montpellier to Perpignan, there is easily space for an hourly London - Barcelona service.
Not at all. 8 trains each way daily doesn’t mean that the trains have to return each way. The first couple would make it back, the others could have a siesta in the Catalonian sunshine before coming back the next day.
Well quite.
As are the timings.
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Not sure about that; about a quarter of BAs short haul fleet are newish A32xneos, which are very efficient and have more seats than the newish 737-MAX 8s that make a quarter of the Ryanair fleet. Similarly the rest of BAs short haul fleet is A32x, which again are more efficient and have more seats than Ryanair’s 737-2s and 8s. Theres only a couple of years in it, fleet age wide. I suspect Ryanair has a better load factor though, so in broad terms they’ll be much the same on a per passenger km basis.
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There's just one ocean liner left operating in the world (the QM2, which does a monthly transatlantic return crossing, in between acting as a cruise liner). Cruise ships just potter about from port to port. They're Butlins-on-sea, not a form of transport.
I'm happy to reduce excess car use, though I'd target the short journeys in urban areas first as they're the least efficient. Those cruise ships are incredibly bad for the environment too.
That reminds me, I need to put a load out now (BRB)
I admit that steam trains are a bit of a vice.
How hot?! There were a couple of units at the weekend which were taken out of service because the saloon temperature had climbed to 28°C and this was considered dangerous without space to move passengers to, or hopper windows to open. I can't believe that people heat their houses to that.
Athens, yes. Warsaw, certainly not. 16hrs 21min according to Google Maps, and that's with some quite generous connections.
That metre gauge heritage line looks nice, but otherwise I'll stick with the Double Fairlies. I'd use surface transport anyway. Off to the Alps in a couple of weeks for my European narrow gauge fix.Well if you don't mind I'm going to drink in some Balearic sunshine, local cuisine and culture. You can take North Wales and the rain...
Dracula's castle is something I'd like to visit, along with the Romanian forestry railways. Again, somewhere I'd use surface transport to get to.
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