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SUMMER HOLIDAY

Peter Hughes looks at how our horizons have expanded and the world has shrunk since 1963

"We're all going on a summer holiday" sang a British pop star, Cliff Richard, way back in 1963, but he and his musicians never thought of going further than ex-Yugoslavia. Their adventure in the film “Summer Holiday” involved buying a London bus and driving through Europe.

The few package holidays available were to places such as Costa Brava, Palma, Austria or Italy. Holidaymakers flew in a piston-engined airplane such as the Lockheed Constellation and paid about forty guineas* for 15 days in Majorca.

At that time package holidays were rarely shorter than two weeks. This was because the government wouldn't allow tour operators using charter flights to sell a holiday for less than the price of a return ticket on a scheduled airline to the same place. As a result, the number of people able to afford a holiday abroad was limited.

The expansion of popular travel has been explosive. Around 250,000 people took a package holiday in 1963; in 1992 the figure was 11 million.

Increased prosperity, of course, has made this possible but the biggest influences have been politics and technology. Take Australia, for example.

In 1963 you would have spent your life savings getting there. Now you can go to Sydney on a two-week package and stay at a four-star hotel for a fraction of that price.

It was a mixture of politics and technology that brought the Great Barrier Reel and Sydney harbour within reach. For years the national airlines had opposed any competition from charters but, as the Australian economy declined and with the success of the bicentenary celebrations, revenue from tourism seemed more and more attractive.

So the politicians changed their mind and charters started up in 1988.

The new technology was in the aircraft itself, the Boeing 767 two-engined jet with the range and economy to bring a whole catalogue of long-haul destinations into the package holiday domain Thailand, India, Mexico, East Africa, the States and the Caribbean all have their place in the mass market brochures thanks to the new aircraft.

Politics with an even bigger "P" have opened up parts of the world that the most adventurous would have been reluctant to visit thirty years ago, even if they had been allowed in.

Now several international airlines fly to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, and the tourist can scramble through the Vietcong's secret network of tunnels, which have been specially widened for broad-bottomed westerners.

China now welcomes tourists who throng the Forbidden City, cruise up the Yangtze, and marvel at the Terracotta Warriors at Xian.

As for Eastern Europe, the Russians want tourists almost more than there are tourists to go there, and in the Czech state visitors stroll through the fairy-tale streets of Prague in their millions.

In these cities a complete legacy of architecture has been handed down intact. St Petersburg would still be recognizable to Peter the Great; Prague is still much as Mozart knew it.

Whatever else the communists did, their neglect of ancient buildings has proved to be an unexpected boon and has preserved the beauty of entire city centres.

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