Since the Government announced this week confirming holiday parks can re-open, the industry has seen a surge in Brits booking staycations, with the leading caravan booking platform ukcaravans4hire.com reporting that it has set new company records due to more holidaymakers than ever flocking to the site to plan their getaways.

UK government announced that holiday parks in England can open again from Saturday 4th July. The Scottish government has indicated a reopening date of Wednesday 15th July for Scottish holiday parks and the Welsh government has indicated a reopening date of Monday 13th July for Welsh holiday parks. These dates are subject to change if necessary.

The booking platform, the only one of its kind in the UK to list static caravans for hire across the UK, has a similar function to sites such as Airbnb where guests can search for listings in a specific area, view available dates, and book online. Since the government announcement, website traffic is up 135% compared to the same day the previous week.

In the earlier weeks of June, ukcaravans4hire.com had seen an increase of 36% in enquiries for UK staycations. As a result of further ease in lockdown guidelines, enquiries have since increased a further 96%.

It seems that the locations that have increased in popularity appear to coincide with regions that have had a low number of Coronavirus cases, while those locations that have declined in popularity coincide with regions that have had a high number of cases.

Gareth Irving, director of UKcaravans4hire.com commented: “When looking at our recent bookings, we can see there have been some changes to location popularity when it comes to caravan holidays. Cornwall and Devon are the most popular locations when looking for caravan holidays in the UK this year. 

“According to our data, Devon has had a 67% increase in interest compared to May 2019 with Cornwall just behind at 63%. Locations with a high drop in interest, North Wales (-35%) and North East England (-43%) are likely to have the least amount of visitors this year.

With the coronavirus pandemic creating such a huge impact on the travel industry, it is no surprise that many of us are looking to holiday a little closer to home this year. Hopefully, this continues for the next few months and it helps the UK tourism industry recover from the last 3 months of downtime.”