Why we should all holiday in Yorkshire this year – Jayne Dowle

In the spirit of optimism last autumn, we’d provisionally booked and paid the deposit for a three-night break to look forward to in the Easter holidays. Typical. April 9 to April 12, ending the very day that restrictions are set to be lifted and single household stays in non-serviced accommodation allowed once more.

According to the PM’s road map, self-contained holiday accommodation should reopen from this date, as well as outdoor settings such as theme parks, zoos and beer gardens.

A quick messaging session later and we’d managed to move our holiday to a later date in April. Apparently, we weren’t the only ones to start getting the cases out of the loft.

Susan Briggs, director of the The Tourism Network, which offers marketing advice to businesses in the Dales, says Yorkshire B&Bs, hotels and pubs with rooms benefited immediately from this very particular Boris bounce: “One said, ‘literally Boris sat down and the phone rang’. I think the point is that there is this huge pent-up demand to get away and people feel more secure going to familiar places in Britain.”

She’s right. However, travel firms and airlines are also reporting a surge in bookings for holidays abroad. They’re provisionally allowed from May 17. Even if I was a lottery winner and money was no object, I’d hold my horses before I thought about getting on a plane.

The time-consuming and costly experience of various cancellations last year – including a four-figure Croatian villa/flight booking still ‘on hold’ – make me more than slightly nervous.

Over the years, I’ve travelled alone to some pretty challenging countries, including China, Australia and Kenya, but the prospect of Grant Shapps plunging my holiday destination into a red zone overnight and holing me up in an airport hotel for a ruinously expensive 10-day quarantine stay fills me with more dread than getting thrown into jail in Shanghai.

Stay local, I hear is the new public information slogan, set to replace ‘Stay at home’. When it comes to tourism, may I be permitted to add ‘stay regional’ to this?

Here in Yorkshire, we are blessed with an unrivalled choice of coast, countryside and interesting towns and cities, with such a choice of accommodation, from glitzy five-star hotels to glamping pods in the wilderness of our National Parks. Pre-pandemic, Yorkshire tourism was worth an estimated £9bn to our economy and supported tens of thousands of jobs.

Breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect of three nights in a windswept caravan is hardly a selfish indulgence. I strongly believe that we should all be encouraged to make 2021 the year when we holiday close to home, a so-called ‘staycation’ in other words.

If the pandemic has left most of us powerless in the face of government restrictions, this is one way we can strike out and do our own bit.

In turn however, the Government must commit time and effort into supporting our domestic tourism industry. On this, so far, Ministers have shown scant appreciation for its nuances. Perhaps it is time for Nigel Huddleston, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Sport, Heritage and Tourism, to come forward and offer some clarity.

Much respected people and leaders like Susan Briggs are calling for more public information from the Government on what is allowed and when, not just in our region but across the UK.

She says that there is still confusion about the sliding scale of openings, with many members of the public not sure what constitutes serviced – a hotel, guest house or similar – or non-serviced such as a self-contained holiday let.

In addition, the status of many accommodation providers, including campsites, cookery schools and health spas, is about as clear to many of us as a mud bath/pie/wrap. And there is further obfuscation about larger multi-guest holiday lets such as farmhouses and manor houses which technically can’t open until June, when all restrictions are set to be lifted.

This bafflement is already proving counter-productive. One owner of a Yorkshire Dales pub with rooms tells Briggs that she’s finding potential guests less than polite when told over the phone that they can’t stay – because it’s a ‘serviced hotel’ – before May 17.

A particularly shirty customer kicked off when told he couldn’t book in on March 8, the day that schools are set to reopen and the very first tentative step towards easing lockdown. Either this particular chap wasn’t listening on Monday evening or the Government need a clear and direct loudspeaker.

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