23 December 2008

Nearly half of Brits plan overseas trip this Christmas

Nearly 50% of Brits are hoping to head abroad during the Christmas break, according to the latest online poll by Holiday Extras.

In the survey of Holiday Extras customers, 45.6% said they were planning to spend part of the Christmas break overseas.

Meanwhile 4% said that they couldn't afford a festive holiday, but would love to go away if they had the cash.

While many are desperate to flee the country, 49.7% of customers polled love the traditional British Christmas and are planning to staying in the UK.

Just under 1% were still undecided on their Christmas holiday plans.

See today's separate story to see what VisitBritain has to say about festive breaks.

By Bev Fearis

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Your Comments (4)

Half of the country???

I have to agree with Alan, how ridiculous is it to think that half of the population are going abroad this xmas. Where was this survey carried out?? Obviously not where I live!

By john hobson, Friday, December 26, 2008
You can trust some stats

Its nice to know that Alan Bowen has such a high regard for press releases, but I can assure him that ABTA starts getting requests from the media for ABTA data on the Christmas Getaway as early as November, clearly journalists apreciate the information even if he doesn't. We obtain detailed data from all the main UK airports and others such as Eurostar, to arrive at our total, so it is as accurate as we can make it.

By Sean Tipton, Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Nearly half of Brits plan overseas trip this Christmas

Alan Bowen hits the nail on the head when he challenges the credence given to these partial surveys. First we have "Brits stying on home soil for festive break", followed by a claim that half of us are planning overseas trips this Christmas. Call me skeptical, but I did a separate survey to determine the veracity of these statistics and found, to my complete surprise, that 100% of us are staying at home this Christmas - so there's your headline. We didn't have the time or resources to extend the survey beyond immediate family, but hey, what's sauce for the goose...... Wishing you a happy Christmas and a robust New Year.

By Tom Buncle, Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Lies, damned lies and statistics

This shows how worthless most 'surveys' really are. This one suggests nearly 30m Brits are going abroad at Christmas, just how is not disclosed...maybe we can walk across the English Channel... ABTA says in their annual 'lets send it now because there is no other news' PR statement that 3 million are leaving, only one tenth of this survey's conclusion and Holiday Autos on the same day says demand for cars over Christmas is UK based. Isn't time we all looked more carefully at how these statistics are created before beliving a word of them? I predict that 2009 will be the best year for the travel industry since 1974 or 1991 or 2001.......

By Alan Bowen, Tuesday, December 23, 2008