An upsurge in UK holidays?
Noel Baptiste
There is little doubt that in the short term the part of the British travel industry selling overseas holidays will suffer from an adverse reaction at consumer levelas a result of the disasters of 1974. This will probably be reflected in a great upsurge in UK-based holidays and will last until stability is felt to have returned to the overseas holiday situation. At the bottom end of the market there will probably be a tendency for those who usually spend a holiday within the UK to make do with a holiday at home instead.
But these are likely to be shortterm reactions. Once the economic situation and the rate of inflation have become more predictable, and domestic budgets can be planned with reasonable accuracy, normal holiday patterns will reassert themselves.
From the industry's point of view the current crisis presents a unique opportunity to achieve the realistic
pricing policies which the Travel Industry Marketing Group has been advocating for the last five years.
Travel has been the only product of major importance which has become relatively cheaper over the last twenty-five years and While the industry's lack of profitabilitY has successfully deterred predators from a variety of different commercial fields, it has also inevitablY produced the day of reckoning. ff, what is basically a highly-organiseo and efficient industry can now get; used to pricing its products Wit" profitability instead of volume la mind, and selling itself on value not price, it will undoubtedly be we placed to take advantage of the expanding UK economy of the late 1970s.
Noel Baptiste is Secretary of the Travel Industry Marketing GrouP and a travel industry PR consultant
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