The Eight Million People Lost to Travel

Celebrating inclusion and the Power of Tourism

I’ve been reflecting on our most successful year yet - helping 1,854 families to get away on holiday in 2022.

We did it in part thanks to England for Everyone, an initiative funded by the Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport (as it was then) and delivered in partnership with VisitEngland.?We know the programme had a big impact on the families it reached and maybe shockingly that 49% of them were travelling for the first time ever.?

But that wasn’t an anomaly – across all the families we helped to travel in 2022, just under half had never had a holiday before.?Stats like that make me curious - I have to find out more. So I spent some time looking at ABTA’s Holiday Habits report.?In 2022 it shows that 23% of people in the UK didn’t have a holiday.?Even pre-Covid that number was as high as 12% - around 8 million people in a population of just over 67 million people.?It leads me to ask – why??It can’t just be because they didn’t fancy it.

And I also don’t think it’s just about money either.?Of course, it’s one factor.?And it would be easy to assume that it’s the main one, but for most of the population how much spare cash you have isn’t fixed.?It changes with life events big and small – from new jobs or redundancy, ?to starting or extending a family or getting an unexpected bill. Why people aren’t travelling is much more nuanced than money.

Barriers to tourism

With data from referrers about families’ eligibility for our services, feedback from families themselves and a few other reputable sources, we can start to piece together what some of the other reasons might be. We know that

• Around 25% of families in the UK have 3 or more dependent children. For the families supported by Family Holiday Charity, it’s more like 40%.
• 1 in 4 people will experience a mental health issue each year. For the families supported by Family Holiday Charity, the figure is double - around 1 in 2.
• Around 1 in 20 families in the general population have experienced domestic abuse. For the families supported the charity, its almost 1 in 3.
• In the general population 7 in 100 children are young carers for a parent or sibling, but for the families supported by the Charity it’s as high as 1 in 5.

These are some of the real issues being faced by real families.?And they’ll be some of the reasons that families aren’t able to access tourism too.?

Why would you prioritise travel, if you’ve never travelled?

By choosing to understand the barriers families face to going on holiday it’s possible that we can help them get that first tourism experience by taking steps to make it more accessible and inclusive.

Surely making travel fairer is something everyone in the sector can get behind. Not just to improve the quality of so many lives but also to create a desire to travel amongst those who don’t and with it a new market opportunity, too.?If you have never had a tourism experience you don’t know what it can bring to you or your family, how it will make you feel. ?When we show people and they feel it, they embrace it and they prioritise it.

Some of the families who travelled with us in the past year through England for Everyone made this clear.

One mum told us about her son – “My son is adamant now, because he's doing part time. All of a sudden, he's like, I'm going to spend less money on, you know, silly things like coffee when I'm out I won't buy a cup of coffee and stuff like that, he said because I’d rather put my money away and go on holiday. Now he's been on holiday he's actually realised the value of a holiday and what it does for you, because he'd never had one before. He didn't know. So we've never thought about that. It's changed his mindset, if you like”.

And another mum talked about the habit changes she’s going to make as a result of having been away, because now she’s had time away with her family, she’d like to do it again - “I want to stop smoking, because then I can put that money aside and put that away. You know what I'm realizing selfishly, sometimes we can waste money on things that we don't need. Yes, we think we need them, but we don't need them. When actually something like that is far more valuable to everyone and for the morale of the family”.

It’s about inclusion.

For Family Holiday Charity, and for me, this issue about some families being absent in travel is one of inclusion.?And when we talk about inclusion, we mean every member of our society being able to participate in the thing that we love and value, and that unites us as a travel sector alongside our current customers.

So this year we’re digging deeper to really understand the barriers to tourism so we can help the tourism industry with some tangible actions to make travel more inclusive.?

At our recent Power of Tourism event, charity trustee and sector leader, Julia Lo Bue-Said emphasised the role the sector can play in supporting wider participation. She called for cohesion on understanding why customers aren’t travelling and working with the charity to break down the barriers to tourism by talking about how we should learn together about the estimated?8m people who aren’t going on holiday.?

“If we understand why, we’ll know how we can work together to address the barriers and get them travelling. We can do this by bringing together the evidence and impetus to build change inside and outside the sector, so more children and young people go on to feel the positive benefits of a holiday for themselves”, she said, and continued - “In the meantime it costs the Family Holiday Charity around ￡600 to give a whole family their first tourism experience. The more funds the Charity has the more chance we have to showcase the tourism experience to them first hand and motivate and inspire them to include travel in their lives in the future”.

If you can support Family Holiday Charity to deliver holidays for families facing tough times or you’re interested in developing a partnership to make tourism more inclusive there are lots of opportunities to be involved. I’d love to hear from you.