Football Went To Rome, Holidays Came Home - The Impact Of ‘staycations' On The UK's Labour Market

30th July 2021

As with last year, many holiday makers will be spending this summer in the UK. So in this Spotlight we look at the implications of another year of ‘staycations' for the UK's labour market.

The tourism industry has been hit hard by the Covid-19 crisis
For much of the past 18 months there have been tight restrictions on international travel, leading to a sharp fall in tourism. Throughout 2020, tourist accommodation in the UK was operating at between a third and half of ‘normal' levels (see Figure 1). Other measures paint a similar picture. Across 2020, the total number of hours worked in visitor accommodation was down 45 per cent on 2019 levels. There were similar falls in other tourism-heavy sectors, such as transport rental (-44 per cent), food and beverage services (-36 per cent), and passenger transport (-30 per cent). These falls compare to the 11 per cent fall in hours worked across the economy as a whole.

So it's clear that overall tourism activity is down. But because the restrictions on international travel have for most of the crisis been stricter than those on internal travel, within the overall trend of lower tourism has been a switch away from international and towards domestic tourism. This ‘staycation' effect can be seen in the pattern of overnight stays in tourist accommodation by nationality of the tourist. In Europe last August, nights spent in tourist accommodation by tourists visiting from another country were 57 per cent down on their 2019 level, compared to 12 per cent down among domestic visitors (see Figure 2). Across Europe, domestic tourism normally accounts for 53 per cent of overall tourist stays; last summer this rose to 70 per cent.

Read the full article at the Resolution Foundation