UK seaside gets a new boom with domestic tourism

Monday, September 13, 2021

Children clutching glow sticks shrieked with tremendosu enjoyment and the bystanders looked with awe as the Illuminations lights festival of Blackpool, a town in England, was launched to a spectacular volley of fireworks from its 158m Victorian tower.

This northwest English town’s display of lights crowns an extended tourist season as the traditional seaside resorts of Britain make the profit from a boom in domestic tourism during the pandemic.

Pricey tests of COVID-19, vaccine certification, quarantines and the UK government’s constant changing traffic-light system for international travel have diminished the attraction of foreign travel and even made it inaccessible for British vacationers.

However, domestic tourism has been helped as restrictions were raised and providing benefit to seaside resorts that were once preferred destinations for the Britons before the advent of cheap overseas package holidays to warmer and sunnier climes.

Blackpool, on the Irish Sea north of Liverpool and Manchester, embodies the rise and fall of the quintessential British seaside resort.

Blackpool became Britain’s premier mass tourist destination in the 19th and 20th centuries for city dwellers after the arrival of the railways. It worked as escape smog, enjoying bracing sea air and cheap entertainment.

From the 1960s, affordable air travel and holidays attracted Britons overseas and knocked Blackpool off its balance. By 2008, it offered 40 per cent fewer bed spaces than in 1987.

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