Travel with Katie Butler: Three years since the start of the Covid travel chaos

Katie Butler writes: This week marked ten years since I was called to a meeting where it was announced that the saturated retail estate would be closing 195 retail stores following the joint venture of Thomas Cook and Co-Operative Travel – Heckmondwike to be one of them.

There are many memorable dates that have stayed with me throughout my career in travel but March 6, 2013 is up there at the top.

However, it turned out to be for the best – it gave me the opportunity to take on the shop premises and keep on our assistant manager Leanne.

It’s almost ten years now that we have been looking after our customers as Total Travel, and we have never looked back!

This week also marks another anniversary – March 14, 2020.

It was a chilly Saturday morning in store and we took a call from a customer at Manchester Airport waiting to board his flight to Tenerife.

He said: “They've said our flight is not going to Tenerife and that there will be no more flights. W hat do you want us to do, shall we come home?”.

Whoah! “Ok Sir, let us take a look into it and try to find out what is happening and we will call you straight back once we have further information”, Leanne calmly advised our customer.

We quite often take similar calls from customers who are at the airport when flights are delayed, so it was nothing too out of the ordinary.

However, whilst Leanne was on hold to Jet2 to try to establish the reasons, I was contacted by a travel colleague telling me to to look at Flight Radar.

Flight Radar is a global tracking service that provides real-time information about thousands of aircraft across the world.

What I saw on Flight Radar made me rub my eyes several times to make sure I was seeing it correctly.

It seemed that all Jet2 planes heading to anywhere in Spain had turned around mid-air!

Shortly after, the airline announced it had cancelled all flights to the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

We had never seen anything quite like it. It was an extremely surreal situation and of course just the start of the chaos to come, with cancellations and amendments.

At the time of writing this week, I am sat in the shop watching the snow get heavier and heavier (please don't settle).

As we are well aware, our local and regional airports (in fact all UK airports), don't handle even a small amount of snow and so I have everything crossed for minimal disruption.

Late bookings remain very strong and we welcomed June into one of the top selling months for bookings last week.

Whilst we are making plenty of bookings well in advance it does seem that the late deal is continuing to be popular.

The great thing about a late deal/last minute holiday is you don't have long to wait for your holiday.

You might not get exactly what you want but you know you will be in sunnier climes before you know it.