Spain sought to take advantage of the relaxation of UK travel rules on Friday by announcing it will lift the requirement for children aged between 2 and 17 to be fully vaccinated to enter the country from Monday, in time for next week's UK half-term.
Instead, they will only be required to show evidence of a negative PCR test taken within the past 72 hours of arrival.
UK adults will continue to need to be fully vaccinated to enter Spain, however.
The first UK school holiday of the year has attracted a profusion of bookings now that all testing requirements have been dropped for those who are fully vaccinated and those under 18.
Andrew Flintham, managing director for travel group Tui UK, said bookings for February half-term and Easter were now comparable with 2019.
“There remains a huge pent-up demand for international travel and we've seen strong and sustained booking patterns since the announcement as customers look to go abroad with ease and without the added expense of testing,” he said.
The UK's Gatwick Airport on Friday announced it would be reopening its south terminal to cater for the resurgence. Figures from digital travel agency Skyscanner show bookings for economy return travel from the UK this summer increased by 394 per cent in January 2022 compared with the previous month.
“We're going to be significantly busier over the February half-term. We're going to say somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 passengers using Gatwick each day,” the airport's chief executive, Stewart Wingate, told Sky News.
Cross-Channel train operator Eurostar said more than 125,000 people are booked to travel between the UK and the continent during the school holiday.
The busiest day will be Friday, when more than 16,000 passengers are booked to travel. Several services are sold out.
“With travel restrictions between the UK and France lifting, we are seeing a surge in leisure traffic in the short term and looking further ahead to spring and early summer,” said Eurostar chief commercial officer Francois Le Doze.
“We have as many passengers booked to travel in February half-term as we had across the whole of January, which shows the potential for recovery and the appetite for travel between the UK and the continent.”
While Spain remains at the top when it comes to bookings from the UK for the summer months, its requirement that children aged 12 to 17 be fully vaccinated led to many families cancelling plans to visit this half-term.
Whether the abrogation of this rule will come too late for the Spanish tourism industry to claw back lost bookings remains to be seen.
Spain's Minister for Trade, Industry and Tourism Maria Reyes Maroto on Friday affirmed her country's commitment to “safe and easy” travel, “especially for families travelling with children".
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