The British Abroad — The Changing World And Its Impact On Britain And The Travel Industry

Commissioned by ABTA (Association of British Travel Agents), MORI researched attitudes among British package holiday makers towards travel and holidays, favourite destinations and ways of finding out information and booking holidays and flights.

The results of this survey were presented by MORI's chairman, Sir Robert Worcester, at the ABTA conference in Cairo in October 2002.

Some of the key points from this research are:

• September 11th has had less of an impact than was feared on travel. Bookings and travel destinations have been fairly constant -- and the USA has risen in terms of being people's 'dream destination'.
• More than four in five people with internet access have used the net for travel information.
• Bookings via travel agents are at their lowest level since MORI started recording this information in 1990 -- with a significant drop since 2000.
• Three in 10 package holiday makers have flown with a no-frills carrier in the past 12 months; seven in 10 have not used a no-frills carrier at all -- yet.

• What Our Customers Think: and what about our non customers, and the future? Presented by: ABTA, Cairo, 20th October 2002, pdf 310K

Technical details

Interviews were conducted, face-to-face, in-home, with adult (16+) members of the population who had taken a package holiday in the last 12 months. A total of 713 interviews took place between 10-25 September 2002. Interviews took place in 90 different constituencies across Great Britain. Quotas were set, and data have been weighted, by sex, age and working status, in order that the findings are representative of all package holiday takers.