Can it really be five whole years since Covid-19 hit and travel came to a complete standstill?
Katie Butler, Total Travel, writes: We swapped passports for hand gel, airport lounges for our living rooms and sandy beaches for our own back gardens.
It’s hard to believe that five years ago this month, the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, announced the first lockdown in the UK, ordering people to “stay at home”.
One memory that I will never forget, and is talked about often, was March 14, 2020 – a chilly Saturday morning in-store and we received a call from a customer at Manchester Airport who was hoping to escape the chill and board a flight to Tenerife to join a cruise.
He said: “They have said our flight is not going to depart and no more flights will be departing, what do you want us to do, shall we come home?”
What on earth was going on?
“Mr Hill, let us take a look and try to find out what is happening as we have not received any notification of this, we will call you back once we have further information,” Leanne calmly advised our customer.
We quite often take calls from customers who are at the airport when flights are delayed and so it was not out of the ordinary to receive a call like this, apart from the fact of course this was March 2020, and in this year nothing could be deemed as ordinary.
Whilst Leanne was on hold to Jet2 to try to establish the reasons, I remember a travel colleague from another agency calling me on my mobile and almost yelling at me to look at Flight Radar (Flight Radar is a global tracking service that provides real-time information about thousands of aircraft across the world).
What I saw on Flight Radar made me rub my eyes several times to ensure I was seeing things correctly, but indeed it was correct and it seemed that all Jet2 aircraft heading to anywhere in Spain had turned around mid-air!
It was announced shortly after that the airline had cancelled all flights to Spain and Spanish islands due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
We had never seen anything quite like it, it was an extremely surreal situation. It was definitely unknown territory and of course it was the start of the chaos to come – with cancellations and amendments.
Thankfully, in 2025, the days of lockdowns, passenger locater forms, PCR and lateral flow tests now seem a distant memory for most of us and a whole half decade later the industry looks to be in pretty good nick.
Many travel agents, airlines and tour operators have celebrated record-breaking years (us included).
The proof is in the pudding, as only last week, Manchester Airport announced that February 2025 figures showed it to be the best February on record, ever.
Managing director Chris Woodroofe said: “We’ve just recorded our busiest February on record – more than two million passengers – and that was driven by people putting their faith in us during half-term.”
May remained our top selling month last week with a 13 per cent share of new bookings and April was second with a 12 per cent share of the bookings.
Top selling destinations were Turkey, Tenerife and cruises from the UK.
