Travel firms seeing the green shoots of recovery

‘While it is early days, the green shoots of recovery can already be seen,’ said a Condor Ferries spokesman.

A Blue Islands spokesman said that business is growing, especially tourist travel, but business travel is still down.

‘We’ve assessed through Jersey’s travel tracker forms that only 5% to 6% of traffic is from business travel right now,’ he said.

‘That number should be closer to 40%. With the advent of Zoom, people have gotten in the habit of doing things remotely and it’ll take time for that to wear off.

‘Additionally, a lot of corporations haven’t even asked people back to offices yet, so business trips have been on hold.

‘That’s not to say business travel won’t come back, but we have to be realistic in what we expect and when we expect it.’

Aurigny, which has recently started a once-weekly seasonal flight to Norwich from Guernsey, said it is waiting to see how the pandemic plays out, like all companies and sectors.

‘It’s nice to see people starting to view travel as a normal thing to do again.

‘However, we’re nowhere near back to 2019 levels,’ said Aurigny PR manager Jess Mauger.

‘Aurigny are currently operating services based on demand and will continue to monitor this on all routes between the CTA.’

Aurigny was operating up to six daily return flights to London Gatwick airport in summer 2019. Currently, there are usually two daily return flights to Gatwick. In 2019, there were around three to four daily flights to and from Southampton Airport, but now there are usually two rotations.

‘Traffic is still down, especially between Guernsey and Jersey. It’s certainly not an unreasonable request by any means, but the testing requirements and restrictions are an inhibitor to travel,’ said a Blue Islands spokesperson.

‘Like everyone else, we’re just waiting for the pandemic to improve and regulations to slowly fall away.’

Condor Ferries has a revised summer timetable from the UK that provides a high speed boat to each island and provides extra capacity during weekends and holidays and is less frequent during weekdays.

‘Car and passenger capacity has doubled so we can now transport 400 cars and 1,600 passengers per day to the islands.

‘There are many instances recently where Liberation and Voyager has sailed full to Guernsey and Jersey, which helps support the inbound visitor market and the new schedule also provides options for islanders,’ a Condor Ferries spokesman said.

However, he said the situation with France is less certain.

‘We do not expect to see many inbound visitors so the frequency of services could remain lower than usual, although it is pleasing to note that travel from both islands to St Malo is starting to pick up.’