Travel with Katie Butler: Turkey on track to welcome record number of Brits this year

Katie Butler writes: At the time of writing this, it is too early to provide feedback, but we look forward to telling you all about it in next week’s edition.

We will be meeting with a lot of hotel chains, attending meeting sessions and enjoying some great entertainment, including live performances from Boney M.

A strange one for us last week – on Friday morning we had several phone calls from a number of our customers due to be travelling home – advising us that they were delayed.

The reason given from the airlines was that the delay was due to a Chinese rocket in the airspace!

In amazement we did get to the bottom of this and it turned out to be correct.

Hundreds of flights from Spain, Balearics, Canaries and Portugal were in fact delayed due to fears they may be hit by debris from a Chinese rocket!

Spain's air traffic control were forced to impose air traffic restrictions for an hour on Friday morning as remnants of the Chinese rocket passed over Spain before it crashed into the sea off the coast of Mexico.

In my many, many years of working in the industry I have not heard of this before and I initially thought I was going a little crazy and it was in actual fact April 1.

Restrictions over the world continue to be eased with Abu Dhabi last week putting an end to all Covid restrictions.

We are still waiting for updates from the USA but as it stands – to travel to the United States for a holiday or business you still need to be vaccinated.

Amazing news from Turkey though, who have last week published official tourism figures showing that the country is on track to have welcomed a record three million UK visitors.

Smashing the previous record set in 2019.

The official figures show that in the first months of the year, the country welcomed over 2.8 million UK visitors compared with 2.56 million for the whole of 2019.

Turkey has been an extremely popular destination for UK visitors this year, namely due to dropping Covid restrictions relatively early into the holiday season and the fact that it also offers better value for money than many of its European counterparts.

In perspective, Spain typically welcomes around 18 million UK tourists.

Late bookings continue to thrive and I can honestly say that I have never known a year where on check-in we can see that planes are operating to full capacity. Brilliant news for the airlines.

However, this does mean that if you have not pre-booked your seats you may not be allocated seats together.

Most airlines now have the facility for you to choose your seats together at the time of booking and you can actually pick where you wish to sit on the aircraft.

It may be worth looking at this when you book your next holiday.