41 Percent of Britons Can’t Afford Summer Holidays This Year

Yesterday we reported on Skift’s survey findings on summer vacation plans of Americans, with the essence being that the great American summer vacation is on its way out.

Today, we’re releasing results of our second survey, this time on summer vacation plans for United Kingdom, and the picture isn’t any prettier, and in fact, even worse in some ways: 41 percent of British people polled say they can’t afford to take a summer vacation this year! Another 25 percent said they are too busy to take vacation. All in all, about 65 percent of Britons aren’t planning on taking any vacations this busy summer of 2014.

This compares to about 33 percent of Americans saying they can’t afford a vacation this summer and almost 30 percent saying they’re too busy for it.

Important: This single-question survey — not served to Skift users — was administered to the U.K. internet population from Apr 17-20, 2014 through Google Consumer Surveys, with 1000 responses, weighted down to 813 responses. The methodology is explained here. See previous Skift Surveys here.

The full results and breakdown by gender, age, geography and other criteria, below.

The topline result:

The gender breakdown: more British women say they can;t afford a summer vacation, while more men say they’re busy.

The age-wise breakdown: Middle ages bring on more responsibilities, less affordability of vacations, while young are too busy for vacations. 

Geographic breakdown: Wales residents are clearly less able to afford summer vacations than England, Ireland and Scotland.