The £50 Boom
HOLIDAY TRAVEL
From ANDREW ROBERTSON
WHEN I watched the Home Secretary, Mr Roy Jenkins, opening the new office build- ing of Horizon Holidays a few days after his Cabinet colleague, the Chancellor of the Ex- chequer, had pleaded with people not to take any more foreign holidays, it never occurred to me that Mr Callaghan would hit on the one formula calculated to pour money into the cash registers of the tour operators. Already the booking figures are well up on a year ago, with people rushing to spend their allowance as if it was a free gift. Every newspaper has carried its quota of January supplements based on the £50, and usually taking into account quite ruth- lessly the £15 sterling, which is supposed to be for travelling expenses.
In spite of all this, the pattern of holiday- taking has hardly changed, with people booking up for Spain (naturally, it has one of -the most favourable exchange rates), Italy and France (not all that expensive if you dodge Paris and the Cote d'Azur). The boss of Horizon, Mr Vladimir Reitz, has even coined the slogan 'Three cheers for the Chancellor' to celebrate the steep rise in his sales curve.
There seems to be some misapprehension abroad that the £50 is all that the individual can spend on his holiday, but a glance at any of the travel supplements, with staff reporters taking their cars and wives to Greece and Por- tugal, camping, and still spending over £100,
shows a much higher average than this. The truth is, as the chairman of Al3TA has said, most Englishmen going abroad spend around £20 less than the present allowance for foreign currency.
This artificially induced economic frame of mind has sent many who would normally prefer to go it alone scampering to the tour-mongers. Apart from counselling them, as Clement Freud did on the Frost Programme, to watch for those funny little words 'optional' and 'from,' as in 'from £25,' I would emphasise that this is only necessary as a means of worry minimisation (a phenomenon known to American tourists in Europe). The practical alternatives are many, and need not involve camping. For instance, it costs just over £50 to transport car and couple to Biarritz and back, and from there a Pyrenean tour via Jaca and Andorra, the Col de Puymorens, to the Dordogne, the Cote d'Argent —any of a hundred places—can be done with pleasure and even a little serious eating well within the limit, the limit for this lucky pair being 1155, which is quite a sum to get through even in three weeks. The hotels in Navarre, Aragon and Huesca are cheap and sometimes luxurious, with swimming pools (like the Baztan, near Elizondo, and the Gran Hotel, Jaca). There are paradors, and there is the Ordesa National Park. After an economical spell in Spain (an& a tank-full of duty-free petrol in Andorra), one can pass a more open-handed half-holiday in France. I think I would underbid Horizon and offer two cheers for the Chancellor.
Two cheers because, although he has probably inspired more people than ever to think about a
holiday abroad, he has given the determined holidayer abroad somewhat more arithmetic to do. We have to feel grateful to the hardworking agents who have calculated the `V form content' (accent on first syllable: it has nothing to do with happiness) of our outlay. Mind you, a little economic geography can save a ton of maths. Just by browsing in the brochures I discovered that Iceland is in the sterling area. Remembering a stunning summer cruising the Arctic north of Norway with the Bergen Line, I found Fairways' idea of an Icelandic tour • distinctly nostalgic. Bergen, by some means, have persuaded the Treasury to regard only a fifth of the cost of their tours as 'foreign' in currency terms. The minimum fare for the round trip Newcastle-Kirkenes (on the Russian border) being £55, this becomes.,a proposition to look at. Iceland is more costly, if it's a flying visit, in fact more than double, and journeys are by coach, not everyone's favourite mode of travel.
A lot of agencies have, naturally, plumped for the shared holiday, half sterling, half other: Gibraltar-Algarve (skipping Spain because of certain awkwardnesses), Cyprus-Greece, Malta- Sicily and so on. These three outposts of Com- monwealth still retain the cabotage privilege in air fares, which means that these are specially cheap runs by BEA. If it's second holidays that are preying on your mind, the V form require- ment for such joint ventures is seldom more than £15-£12.
BOAC, too, has an ambitious line in sterling area escapism. Three weeks in Kilimanjaro country for well under £400, or in India and Ceylon, or for not much over the £250 mark the Caribbean is at your feet, and not a V form in sight. It even mixes in a bit of Mexico or the Middle East as part of the deal, but once again that second holiday gets eaten into. Not that many of us could rise to much for what remains after £35 out of the £50 has been spirited away by a tour of Egypt, Jordan and the Lebanon costing about £160. Which only underlines the unreality of the allowance. It isn't the foreign exchange that cramps us, it's the cash.
East of Suez may be easy on the V form, but the cost of transit is high. East of Europe is nearer and in some ways a better bargain. Yugo- slavia is one of the cheapest places and the most liberal, with few of the restrictions that hedge Bulgaria and Hungary, for example. I was much attracted by the thought of a visit to Lake Balaton (ominously referred to as the Black Sea of Central Europe), when I read in a brochure that 'your bilingual guide is ever at your side.' That I couldn't abide, not knowing a word of Magyar.
In the end I had to settle for Ireland, the republic that is. I know the six counties well enough, but not the rest. In Dublin's fair city did you know that you can dine out for less than a couple of quid? Have you heard of the shark- fishing off Kinsale? You can get to Ireland of the Welcomes (that's straight out of the leaflet) for a handful of pennies (the kind that turn into pounds if well looked after). And there's Guin- ness. And the Abbey Theatre. And the man at the Tourist Board says it doesn't rain half as much as they say.
Previous page
