Nowadays package holidays are also becoming more and more popular with people being able to travel relatively cheaply, these started in the 70s and allow people to not need to worry about things such as flight connections etc as they are already covered. Along with these and budget airlines such as Ryan Air and Easy Jet people travel out of the UK and to these less traditional seaside resorts as it is almost easier to do. Along with this in honesty the price is also relatively close when compared to having a holiday down in the South-East of England.
More leisure time and more mobility also cause many people to travel abroad and therefore away from classic seaside resorts. An example of people with more leisure time is retired people. The numbers of people retired has gone from 5 million in 1951 to 10 million in 2001. Many of these people travel throughout the year and want to experience new places not just the seaside resort they visited as a child.
A final reason which may be most important is the unpredictable weather which the UK suffers from. When people book their fortnight away they want to have security that it won’t be a holiday spent inside hiding from the rain. With the UK’s very fickle climate people tend not to holiday there as much as they once did as they cannot be sure they will get the week of sunshine they want. Due to this people boo a holiday away in the Med where they can have more security with the climate they’ll experience.
B)
Within the UK many destinations that were once budding tourist resorts have now started to stagnate or even decline, examples of this are Western Super mare, Plymouth and Skegness. This is due to many reasons such as a larger disposable income, package holidays, budget airlines and longer periods of leisure time. Many things have been done to rejuvenate these resorts that I will write about below. The main way the government in the UK are trying to tackle this is by creating the ETC (English Tourist Council) this was set up in 2001 and is made up of many strategies with a theory behind it that if a resort carries them out it will expand.
The main strategies of the ETC are to,
1: Upgrade accommodation (convert small hotels into self catering etc attracting people with different price budgets)
2: Lengthen the tourist season e.g. Brighton (Has is country wide festival in May causing people to visit at a time they normally wouldn’t)
3: Build for all year (build more indoor leisure facilities meaning people can use them when the weather is bad)
4: Better infrastructure
5: Improve marketing (more advertisement = more people visiting)
Another main factor of rejuvenating tourist resorts is trying to find private funding. However the ETC stated that private companies would not invest unless the government had before as this gave them the feeling that the destination was upcoming and would make them think more about investing. If private funding comes be it from a sports company building a leisure centre or a chain of restaurants building a branch it will cause more people to visit the place and hopefully use the other services the place has to offer e.g. the shop on the way home for a pint of milk etc. if people do this they put money into the local economy which over time raises the socio-economic status of the place.
A prime example of a place that has incorporated both of the above and that is still succeeding as a seaside resort is Brighton. This is a seaside resort that attracts over one million people nowadays and in the 1840s was the most popular tourist attraction in the world. Nowadays Brighton is a city that attracts a large amount of foreign tourists (one of the top 10 foreign tourist resorts in UK) with 10,000 foreign students studying in the city each year. Out of the 8 million that visit for some reason or another 5.3 million are genuine tourists. Over 200,000 also come to the city for conferences which alone brings £60 million per annum. Overall Brighton takes £350 million per year.