Enjoy our first “big” summer holiday for three years

If you are based in the northern hemisphere, what on earth are you doing reading a blog in the middle of our first proper holiday season for three years?

As we learn to live with COVID in most parts of the northern hemisphere we are seeing a rapid return to holiday travel. In the UK, airport chaos has greeted apparently unexpected numbers of travellers.

Many holidaymakers are experiencing reduced levels of service as airports, airlines, hotels and restaurants struggle to get staff. On a recent holiday in Sardinia, we experienced long delays and frankly terrible hotel service. On the way home Heathrow just abandoned attempts to reunite us with our baggage or communicate with us. BA turned off its helplines “to protect the mental health of its employees”. Our bags eventually turned up a week later.

But none of that really mattered because we had the opportunity to get out of the country as a family and enjoy some great weather and different food.

Even those not travelling abroad have been experiencing pretty good weather in many countries, sometimes even too hot which is a novelty for the UK (we experienced a record highest ever temperature this week at over 40 degrees, Portugal reached 47!).

For our clients this means that they and many of their colleagues are away on vacation at this time of year and decision-making has slowed to a crawl. We were expecting it, and after two years where the summer slowdown never came, it’s quite a relief. It seems that during the COVID lockdowns people who couldn’t go away on vacation tended to keep working, or at least keep an eye on their emails. We had the two busiest summers in our company’s history.

However, we also know what happens next. Our clients will come back from vacation towards the end of August and will suddenly remember that they have objectives they needed to hit by the end of the year and budgets they wanted to spend. In a normal year we have a very hectic September as plans are put in place for delivery by December.

But this year we don’t mind, it’s the big holidays at last. We hope you are enjoying yourself, give us a call about your virtual, hybrid or matrix working training plans in September.