Type: Term Paper | Subject: Tourism | Level: Undergraduate | Word Count: ~2,200 words | Referencing: Harvard
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Write a 2,200-word term paper examining the growth of domestic “staycation” tourism in the UK since 2020. Discuss the causes of the trend, which destinations and sectors have benefited most, the pressures it has placed on infrastructure, and whether the shift is likely to persist.
The term “staycation”, referring to a holiday taken within one’s own country rather than abroad, existed in UK tourism vocabulary before 2020 but moved from a niche marketing term to a dominant pattern of national travel behaviour once international travel was restricted by the COVID-19 pandemic (Gössling, Scott and Hall, 2021). This term paper examines the growth of domestic staycation tourism in the UK since 2020, asking what caused the initial shift, which destinations and sectors captured most of the resulting demand, what pressures this growth placed on accommodation and infrastructure, and whether the trend is likely to persist now that international travel has fully reopened.
The discussion proceeds in five parts, examining the pre-pandemic baseline for domestic tourism, the structural shock of the pandemic itself, the regional destinations that benefited most, the accommodation and infrastructure pressures that resulted, and the trend’s likely post-pandemic trajectory, before a final section considers the sustainability implications of concentrated domestic demand.
Prior to 2020, domestic tourism in England had been broadly stable for several years, with the Great Britain Tourism Survey recording around 120 million overnight domestic trips annually across England, Scotland and Wales, alongside a much larger volume of day trips (VisitBritain, 2022). Domestic tourism was generally characterised by a strong seasonal peak in July and August, concentration in a relatively small number of well-established coastal and rural destinations, and a market share consistently smaller than outbound tourism, which by 2019 saw UK residents make over 93 million visits abroad, principally to Spain, France and other short-haul European destinations (Office for National Statistics, 2023).
Butler’s (1980) tourist area life cycle model, though developed decades earlier, remained a useful framework for understanding many of these established UK domestic destinations, several of which, including traditional seaside resorts, had already passed through stagnation and into a slow decline phase by the 2010s, as cheaper flights made continental beach holidays more accessible than the UK’s own coastline for many domestic travellers.
Domestic tourism spend before the pandemic was also heavily skewed towards a narrow summer season, with July and August together accounting for close to a third of annual domestic trip volume, leaving many coastal businesses reliant on a short trading window and vulnerable to poor summer weather. This seasonal concentration is an important part of the pre-pandemic baseline against which the staycation boom should be judged, since much of the subsequent growth initially reinforced, rather than corrected, this seasonal imbalance.
The COVID-19 pandemic produced an almost complete collapse in international travel from March 2020, as successive lockdowns and quarantine requirements made outbound holidays impractical or impossible for most of 2020 and 2021. Gössling, Scott and Hall (2021) describe this as one of the most rapid demand shocks in modern tourism history, with global international arrivals falling by over 70 per cent in 2020 compared with 2019.
For UK residents accustomed to an annual overseas holiday, this created significant pent-up demand for travel that, once domestic restrictions eased between lockdowns, was redirected almost entirely towards destinations within the UK. Hall (2022) describes this substitution effect as central to understanding the staycation boom: it was not, in the first instance, a change in underlying preference for domestic holidays so much as the only form of holiday reliably available, which then introduced a large number of travellers to UK destinations they might not otherwise have visited.
Government guidance and public health messaging reinforced this shift, actively encouraging domestic tourism as a means of supporting a hospitality sector that had been severely affected by lockdown closures, while continued uncertainty over changing international travel corridors and quarantine rules made UK breaks a comparatively low-risk choice throughout much of 2020 and 2021 (UKHospitality, 2022).
The demographic profile of staycation travellers during this period also shifted. Families with young children, who had faced the greatest practical difficulty travelling internationally under changing quarantine and testing rules, were disproportionately represented among new domestic travellers, alongside older travellers who were more cautious about international travel on health grounds. Hall (2022) notes that this demographic broadening, rather than simply higher volume among existing domestic tourists, was significant because it introduced a wider cross-section of UK households to domestic destinations they had not previously considered, a factor later research has linked to some of the trend’s post-pandemic persistence.
Growth in domestic trips was not evenly distributed across the UK. Coastal and rural regions with capacity for outdoor, self-catering and lower-density accommodation captured the largest increases in visitor numbers, while destinations dependent on indoor attractions, international visitors, or dense urban accommodation recovered more slowly. VisitEngland (2023) data illustrates this regional pattern across the main English tourism regions:
| English Tourism Region | 2019 Domestic Overnight Trips (m) | 2021 Domestic Overnight Trips (m) | Change 2019–2021 |
|---|---|---|---|
| South West | 13.8 | 17.1 | +23.9% |
| North West | 11.2 | 13.6 | +21.4% |
| Yorkshire and the Humber | 8.4 | 9.7 | +15.5% |
| South East | 10.6 | 11.9 | +12.3% |
| East of England | 7.9 | 8.6 | +8.9% |
| London | 9.1 | 4.7 | −48.4% |
The South West and North West, both home to well-established coastal and national park destinations such as Cornwall, Devon and the Lake District, recorded the strongest domestic trip growth, reflecting strong existing self-catering and campsite capacity that could be expanded relatively quickly to meet demand. London, by contrast, remained well below its 2019 domestic trip volume even by 2022, since a large share of its visitor economy depends on international arrivals and business travel, both of which recovered more slowly than leisure-driven domestic demand elsewhere (VisitEngland, 2023).
Visitor spend data reinforces this regional pattern: domestic tourism expenditure in the South West rose from approximately £4.9 billion in 2019 to over £6.1 billion in 2021, an increase considerably larger in percentage terms than the corresponding rise in trip numbers, indicating that staycation visitors were also spending more per trip on average, plausibly reflecting higher accommodation prices, longer average stays, or both, over the same period (VisitEngland, 2023).
Camping and caravan holiday parks recorded some of the sharpest increases in demand of any accommodation type, since outdoor, self-contained accommodation was widely perceived as lower-risk during a period of continued infection concern. Several major UK holiday park operators reported booking volumes for summer 2021 exceeding pre-pandemic 2019 levels well before the season began, prompting some parks to extend their operating season into early autumn and invest in additional pitches, a rare instance of rapid capacity expansion within an otherwise supply-constrained accommodation market.
Scotland and Wales followed a broadly similar regional pattern to South West and North West England, with VisitScotland and Visit Wales both reporting record or near-record domestic overnight trip volumes in 2021, concentrated in national park and coastal areas such as the Scottish Highlands, Pembrokeshire and Snowdonia. As in England, these destinations combined strong existing self-catering capacity with outdoor activities that remained permissible under social distancing guidance for longer than many indoor attractions, giving them a further relative advantage during the most restricted phases of the pandemic.
Rogerson and Rogerson (2021) note a broadly similar pattern internationally, describing rural and nature-based destinations as spaces of relative resilience during the pandemic compared with dense urban tourism economies, a pattern the UK regional data above closely mirrors.
The concentration of demand into a small number of popular rural and coastal destinations placed considerable strain on local infrastructure. Cornwall and the Lake District both reported significant pressure on road networks, parking provision and rural waste management during peak periods in 2021, when staycation demand combined with the removal of the usual competing pull of overseas travel to produce visitor volumes that local infrastructure, built for a smaller and more predictable pre-pandemic pattern, struggled to absorb (Cheer, 2020).
Self-catering and holiday-let accommodation saw the sharpest price increases, as fixed short-term supply met rapidly increased demand; several popular staycation destinations reported average nightly rates for self-catering properties rising by more than a third between 2019 and peak summer 2021. This price growth also intersected with a longer-running debate about the impact of short-term holiday lets on local housing availability in popular tourist areas, since properties switched from long-term residential rental to holiday-let use in response to strong staycation returns (UKHospitality, 2022).
Staffing shortages compounded these pressures. The hospitality sector entered the staycation boom having lost a significant share of its workforce during 2020 furlough and redundancy, and faced additional recruitment difficulty linked to reduced availability of EU seasonal labour following the end of UK freedom of movement, leaving many businesses unable to open at full capacity even as demand recovered strongly (UKHospitality, 2022).
Wage pressure compounded staffing shortages, since hospitality businesses in popular staycation destinations competed for a smaller available workforce, and several operators reported raising starting pay significantly between 2021 and 2022 to attract and retain seasonal staff, an additional cost pressure layered on top of already-rising accommodation and food costs, which in turn contributed to the price increases many staycation destinations experienced over the same period.
With international travel fully reopened since 2022, outbound trip volumes have recovered substantially, and domestic overnight trip numbers have eased back from their pandemic peak, suggesting that the most extreme phase of the staycation boom was indeed a temporary substitution effect rather than a permanent change in underlying preference (Office for National Statistics, 2023).
However, several indicators suggest the shift is not purely temporary. VisitBritain (2022) reports that domestic overnight trips in 2022 and 2023 remained above their 2019 baseline even as outbound travel recovered, and survey evidence suggests a meaningful minority of pandemic-era staycationers, particularly those who visited a UK region for the first time, report an intention to return, having discovered destinations they had previously overlooked in favour of familiar overseas resorts.
Cost-of-living pressures since 2022 have also sustained some of the pandemic-era shift towards domestic holidays for economic rather than public-health reasons, as UK households facing squeezed discretionary budgets have continued to substitute shorter, cheaper domestic breaks for longer overseas holidays. This suggests staycation demand is now driven by a combination of genuinely converted new domestic tourists and a separate, economically motivated substitution effect, rather than by pandemic-specific restriction alone.
This pattern is not unique to the UK. Gössling, Scott and Hall (2021) note similar, if generally smaller, domestic tourism increases across several other high-income countries with substantial outbound travel markets prior to the pandemic, suggesting the underlying substitution mechanism operated wherever international travel was restricted and domestic alternatives existed, even though the scale and persistence of the shift varied by country according to the relative attractiveness and capacity of each country’s domestic tourism offer.
The concentration of staycation demand into a limited number of popular destinations has revived longstanding debates about overtourism in a domestic context. Sharpley (2021) argues that sustainable tourism development requires demand to be actively managed and spatially distributed, rather than simply accommodated wherever it happens to arise, a challenge the UK’s staycation boom has made acute in destinations such as Cornwall and the Lake District, where visitor numbers have periodically exceeded what local infrastructure and resident communities can comfortably absorb.
Destination management organisations in several popular staycation regions have responded with dispersal strategies, promoting lesser-visited towns and off-peak travel to relieve pressure on honeypot sites, alongside targeted investment in parking, public transport and waste infrastructure funded partly through local visitor levies. Cheer (2020) frames this kind of managed, resident-centred recovery as an opportunity to build a more sustainable domestic tourism sector than the one that existed before the pandemic, provided investment in infrastructure keeps pace with any lasting increase in domestic demand.
Manchester introduced England’s first city visitor levy in 2023, and a small number of other local authorities and national park bodies have since consulted on similar charges, modelled partly on established schemes in continental European destinations, as a mechanism to fund the additional infrastructure investment that concentrated staycation demand has made necessary, though such levies remain limited in scope and are not yet a general feature of UK domestic tourism funding.
This paper has argued that the UK staycation boom since 2020 originated as a substitution effect, forced by the collapse of international travel, but has left a partial and lasting legacy rather than reverting fully to pre-pandemic patterns. Growth was concentrated in rural and coastal regions with existing self-catering capacity, particularly the South West and North West, while urban destinations dependent on international and business travel recovered more slowly. The resulting pressure on accommodation prices, local infrastructure and hospitality staffing exposed capacity constraints that pre-date the pandemic but were sharply accelerated by it.
Although outbound travel has substantially recovered since 2022, domestic trip volumes above the 2019 baseline, sustained by both newly converted domestic tourists and cost-of-living-driven substitution, suggest the staycation trend is best understood as a permanent enlargement of the domestic tourism market rather than a temporary fad. The principal challenge now facing UK tourism policy is managing this larger baseline of domestic demand sustainably, through dispersal strategies and infrastructure investment, rather than assuming visitor pressure will simply subside of its own accord.
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