Outbound Travel Is Worth £57bn to the UK, ABTA Says
New ABTA research puts outbound travel's value at £57bn a year and 865,000 jobs. It lands two weeks before the Budget, with a list of asks attached.
Holidays abroad are usually counted as money leaving the country. ABTA wants the Treasury to see it differently. Research released on 12 October at its Travel Convention in Funchal, Madeira, puts the value of outbound travel to the UK economy at £57bn a year in gross value added, supporting 865,000 jobs.
That contribution is up 9.6% since 2019, and employment is up 5.7%. The North East relies on it most, with 2.6% of regional economic activity tied to outbound travel. In London, 2.6% of jobs are.
What travellers are telling ABTA
The same research has a warning. Fifteen per cent of people say they will spend less on holidays next year, and 52% of those blame the cost of living, up from 47% last year. People are also booking later. “There is an increasing trend for people to book much closer to departure,” said Mark Tanzer, ABTA‘s chief executive.
The Budget asks
The research arrives ahead of the 28 October Budget, and ABTA has attached a list:
- Air Passenger Duty: freeze it for the rest of this parliament and take all children out of it.
- Business rates: review them for high-street travel agents with physical shops.
- Youth mobility: finish a UK–EU youth experience scheme. ABTA says UK nationals taking tourism jobs in the EU have fallen 69% since Brexit.
- School trips: a reciprocal deal on educational travel, including exemptions from digital border systems.
- Skills and decarbonisation: make V-levels and T-levels work for travel careers, review the Sustainable Aviation Fuel mandate, modernise UK airspace and cut the cost of shoreside power for cruise ships.
Sources
Jeff Cameron writes about neighbourhoods and the business of travel for Not An Atlas, usually from a desk buried in maps, beside a mug of tea big enough to count as carry-on. His first trip was to St. Pete Beach, Florida, where dipping his feet in the Gulf felt like a major expedition, and he's still chasing that first shock of “the ocean can be warm?” He always takes the window seat (nobody climbs over him to get to the washroom), lands already briefed thanks to an audiobook or two about wherever he's going, and sizes up every city by its first cup of coffee. He'll happily walk 45,000 steps in a day to find the side streets where a place really lives. Kraków, Utrecht and Turin are the underrated favourites he'd go back to tomorrow. Friends say curious, candid and composed. His mom says contrary, and she's probably right. Next stop: anywhere a first-class, round-the-world ticket will take him.
