The great British holiday can be wonderful break but rising costs are a threat - Jayne Dowle

Our tourism industry – worth £9bn to our own region of Yorkshire alone - needs all the help it can get. According to Visit Britain, domestic tourism is taking a hit because people no longer have disposable income to spend on hotels, meals out and attractions.

And this was before the impact of increased business rates to come in April and the tourist tax, announced in the November budget.

However, although we might wish to support homegrown tourism, will we be able to afford it? A perfect storm of increased operating costs is on the horizon; it’s inevitable that for many proprietors to survive, the financial impact will be passed on to guests and customers.

Business rates for pubs, hotels and leisure venues are set to spike as the 40 per cent relief, put in place during the Covid pandemic, comes to an end. UKHospitality, the trade body for the hospitality industry, estimates that this will lead to £318m in added costs over three years.

For the average hotel, business rates will increase by 115 per cent during this time span, UKHospitality says, with a rise of 76 per cent for the average pub.

At the same time, with a number of English cities and regions, including West Yorkshire and the North East, gaining the power to levy a new tourist tax on overnight stays, hotels, B&Bs and owners of short-lets warn it will add costs, force billing changes, and ultimately push up room prices.

However, it’s important to keep a sense of perspective. Unless you’re thinking of a February escape perhaps, gone are the days when a week in Benidorm cost far less than a week in Blackpool. Super-cheap flights are harder to find these days, especially if you’re flying from a regional airport.

According to travel website Weather2Travel, a typical one-week holiday abroad for a family of four now costs £3,000 to £4,000 for flights, accommodation, food and activities, possibly more if taken in peak season – the school holidays - or to an expensive destination.

Meanwhile, a full week in the UK could be £1,500 to £2,500, depending on activities. Doing a rough calculation of accommodation costs and how much children need feeding and entertaining, I’d say it would be a modest week’s holiday indeed on £1,500, but it’s doable.

Staying in the UK has always been about the weather. But now, whilst climate change is bringing intense heat and wildfires to European destinations, it’s also bringing warmer temperatures to the UK, with blistering highs of 40 degrees C not uncommon now.

Of course, such mercury-busters are often followed by torrential thunderstorms and even hailstones, but some things about the unpredictable British weather never change.

However, this year, in England alone, compared to the same period of April, May and June 2024, the number of overnight trips fell by 18 per cent, to 18.5 million in total.

This decline, according to the Great Britain Tourism Survey, published by Visit Britain, is due to ongoing economic challenges; the rising cost of living, weakened consumer confidence, plus shifts in the way we regard travel – increasingly as a luxury and not a necessity “for a break”.

In addition, the total spend on domestic tourism fell by eight per cent in the same period, amounting to a loss of £16.6bn. Overnight trips were again badly hit, seeing a 12 per cent year-on-year decline to £5.7bn, whilst spending on day visits dropped by six per cent to £11bn.

If Chancellor Rachel Reeves is as committed to growth as she says, surely her priority must be to look at this crucial part of the economy and ask the Cabinet to set Minister for Tourism Stephanie Peacock, MP for Barnsley South, to work.

“This government is all about growth,” says Julia Simpson, the president of the WTTC (The World Travel and Tourism Council). “Yet here we have a private sector enterprise, travel and tourism, contributing 10 per cent of UK GDP, creating jobs, but we are not prioritising it in any way. We are sabotaging ourselves.”

Simpson was speaking back in April, when a new study showed that international visitors to the UK spent more than £2bn less in 2024 than they did before the pandemic, dropping 5.3 per cent from 2019, to £40.3bn.