easyJet's 2026 Holiday Audit: A Reality Check for the 50+ Traveller

A Report Worth Reading — With One Important Caveat

Earlier this year, easyJet published the Great British Holiday Audit 2026 — a survey of 2,000 British holidaymakers mapping where we're heading in 2026, what we're doing when we get there, and how our booking behaviour is shifting. It is, by the standards of corporate travel research, a genuinely useful document. The data is specific, several of the findings ring true, and I found myself reading it with more interest than I'd expected.

But it is also a marketing document produced by an airline. That doesn't make it wrong. What it does mean is that it's written for the widest possible slice of the British travelling public — not specifically for those of us in our fifties, sixties, and seventies who have a particular set of requirements once we actually arrive somewhere.

So here is my read of it: what I think it gets right, what questions it leaves me asking, and what I'd want to know before acting on any of it.

What the Report Actually Says

The audit identifies fifteen travel trends for 2026. Several of them — selling clothes on Vinted to fund a city break, Dark Sky Tourism for Gen Z astronomers, booking holidays around The White Lotus filming locations — are aimed at a demographic roughly thirty years younger. I've set those aside. They're not irrelevant to easyJet's business, but not really relevant to us.

The two findings I kept coming back to are these:

The growth of longer short-haul flights. The report documents a 21% increase in bookings to what it calls 'longer-leisure destinations' — Morocco, Turkey, and Cyprus — alongside a 12% rise in bookings to Tunisia.

"A 21% increase in bookings to what it calls 'longer-leisure destinations' — Morocco, Turkey, and Cyprus" - easyJet Great British Holiday Audit 2026

The 'Home Alone' finding. Among parents whose adult children still live at home, one in five is now taking more holidays — using the convenience of a built-in house-sitter to travel more freely. I suspect this will resonate with quite a few readers here. The holiday calendar does tend to open up at a certain point in life, and it's worth knowing that the data confirms it's a widespread pattern rather than just a personal observation.

"For parents whose adult children still live at home, one in five are using the opportunity to take advantage of the readily available house sitting when they travel." - easyJet Great British Holiday Audit 2026

Both findings are real and worth knowing. Neither of them tells you whether the destinations involved actually work once you arrive.

The Questions I'd Be Asking Before I Book

This is where I'd want to go further than the report does.

easyJet can tell us where more people are choosing to go. What the report can't do — and doesn't try to do — is tell you whether a specific destination is comfortable to navigate on the ground, or whether the journey to get there is manageable after five hours in economy. Those are the questions I'd be sitting with before I committed to any of the 'longer short-haul' destinations it highlights.

How long is the transfer, really? There's a meaningful difference between a 25-minute private car from the airport to your hotel and a 90-minute shared coach with three drop-offs before yours. After a five-hour flight, that difference matters. Morocco's Marrakech is a destination with genuine appeal. Still, the journey from Menara Airport into the central hotel areas involves slow city traffic and, depending on your accommodation, narrow streets that standard transfer vehicles can't always reach. That's not a reason not to go. It is something I'd want to know before I book.

Is the resort walkable, or will I be resort-bound? Several of the destinations the report highlights as growth areas are beautiful but physically demanding — cobbled medinas, hillside towns, seafronts that look level on a map and aren't. The brochure photograph rarely shows you the gradient. I'd want to know, before I arrived, whether stepping outside the hotel gates led somewhere I could actually walk comfortably.

What's the medical infrastructure? This isn't pessimism — it's the kind of question I think anyone over fifty is entitled to ask before booking a holiday five or six hours from home. English-language healthcare within a reasonable distance, a hospital that accepts the GHIC, a pharmacy that's open on a Sunday afternoon. For some of the destinations in the report, that's straightforward. For others, it requires more digging than a trend document is going to do for you.

📥Auditor's Note: Cyprus — and Paphos specifically — is one of the few destinations in the report's 'longer short-haul' category that I'd call well-documented on all three of these counts. The transfer from the airport takes under 30 minutes in a private vehicle. The central resort is genuinely flat. The medical infrastructure is exceptionally well-suited to UK travellers. If you want the full independent breakdown, it's all in the Paphos audit.

What This Means When You Come to Book

If the report's direction of travel resonates — and I think the longer short-haul trend will feel familiar to many readers here — the practical reality is that the great majority of UK package holidays to these destinations are booked through two operators. easyJet Holidays and Jet2 together account for the dominant share of UK short-haul package travel to Cyprus, Turkey, the Canaries, and the North African coast.

Both offer direct operator booking with full ATOL financial protection, which matters considerably more than the price comparison sites tend to make clear. And both have active promotional frameworks in place for 2026 that are worth understanding before you start your booking session — the difference between triggering the available discounts correctly and missing them entirely can run to £150 or more on a standard two-week package.

The discount stacking method for both operators — the exact sequence that ensures the savings apply correctly at checkout — is covered in detail in my downloadable audit.

A Final Note

The easyJet report is useful data. It confirms that British travellers are becoming more deliberate, more willing to fly a little further for a better experience, and more protective of their holiday budgets. All of that matches what I see and hear from our community.

But data tells you where other people are going. It doesn't tell you whether the shower has a step in it, whether the walk from the hotel to the nearest decent restaurant is level or not, or whether the resort's main clinic closes at lunchtime on a Saturday.

Those are the questions worth asking before you book — and finding the answers before you travel rather than after you arrive is, as far as I'm concerned, the whole point of doing the research properly.

If you're planning a Mediterranean or longer short-haul package holiday this year, the independent Paphos audit is a free 34-page download covering exactly this kind of ground — written specifically for travellers who want the practical details, not the brochure version.

Wishing you a smooth journey and a comfortable stay,

Robert

The Holiday Audit

theholidayaudit.co.uk