The school holidays might be drawing to a close but many Brits are still booking their summer getaways – despite dreaming about them for months – with last minute deals becoming ever more popular, as cost-of-living pressure reshapes how and when the nation takes a break.
That is according to a study of 40 major travel brands, including TUI, Virgin Holidays, P&O Cruises, Sandals, Hilton, Accor, Travelodge, Premier Inn, Sykes Cottages and Secret Escapes, sent between 2016 and 2025.
Online travel agent Loveholidays reports that bookings for next-day departures are up 26% year on year this summer, with bookings made within two days up 19% and within three days up 15%. A decade of campaign data from AI messaging platform Jacquard shows the travel industry has restructured its marketing to holidaymakers around exactly this behaviour.
Jacquard analysed 5,243 travel and hospitality email campaigns – some 3.8 billion messages – and found that the date at which holidaymakers start receiving summer holiday offers and deals has widened from roughly two months to around seven. The first significant wave of summer emails has crept forward from late May in 2017 to early March by 2024, while the season now runs on into late September.
The clearest signal in the data is that squeezed budgets have, perhaps counterintuitively, made holidaymakers want a treat, as opposed to a bargain.
Romance-themed subject lines outperform the average email by 39%, the single largest effect in the study; curiosity and intrigue (“Psst…”, “secret”, mystery deals) win about 15% more often, and personal (“you”, “your”) and indulgent (“treat yourself”, “exclusive”) framing land +13% and +14% respectively.
The shift has a harder edge, too: luxury-toned lines are about 20% more likely to win their test and budget-toned lines about 15% less, while “cheap” and “bargain” cues, which ran at up to 9% of subject lines in 2023, collapsed to around 2% by 2025; the point at which luxury framing overtook budget for the first time on record.
That mirrors how Britons are actually spending. Rather than cancel the holiday, they defer other big-ticket purchases and trade up within it: travel is the top spending priority for 2026, with bigger purchases postponed in favour of “manageable luxuries”, and UK travel spend rose 2.4% in 2025 even as households squeezed other budgets.
External search data points the same way, with interest in luxury holidays “mostly unaffected” by cost-of-living pressures and still growing into 2026. The message that sells, in other words, is a daydream – not a discount.
If aspiration wins, instruction loses. Subject lines opening with the likes of “Book now” or “Discover…” are 46% less likely to be a campaign’s best-performing variant, the weakest tactic measured anywhere in the dataset. Urgency and scarcity language (“last chance”, “hurry”, “ends tonight”) loses 28% of the time; straightforward questions 26%.
The pattern fits the psychology of a big-ticket, deliberated purchase in a squeezed economy, with just 28% of Britons willing to cut holiday spending to cover everyday costs, against 57% who would rather cut back on eating out; the holiday is precisely the purchase people refuse to be rushed into.
Where a deadline is specific, though, it still works. Last-minute offers – tied to a real departure date rather than a manufactured “last chance” – are around 12% more likely to be a campaign’s best performer. And audiences increasingly have their own tools to decide, with more than 60% of Gen Z and Millennials now using AI to help plan their trips, which may mean generic “Book now” blasts are getting overlooked by increasingly savvy AI agents.
Before the pandemic, almost no summer-holiday emails went out before May; just 5% of 2019’s summer campaigns. By 2024 that share had reached 24%. The first significant wave of summer emails has now moved from 20 May in 2017 to 9 March in 2024, while the season now runs on into late September, stretching a two-month summer holiday window into roughly seven.
The reason lies in how the booking calendar has pulled apart at both ends. Cost-conscious planners are booking earlier to spread the cost and lock in prices – 21% of UK adults say they now book earlier to secure a lower price – while a fast-growing last-minute crowd holds out for the best deal, with next-day bookings up 26% year on year, a habit led by under-35s, who over-index on spontaneous, last-minute trips. For marketers, “summer” is no longer a season but a seven-month production cycle.
Jacquard chief product officer Toby Coulthard said: “You’d think squeezed budgets would have made consumers want a bargain holiday. The truth is the opposite: now holidaymakers want a treat.
“A holiday is one of the last things people give up when money is tight, and rather than trade down they trade up within it, which is why ‘treat yourself’, romance and curiosity are doing the heavy lifting while ‘cheap’, ‘book now’ and ‘last chance’ fall flat. This makes sense – holidays, often fantasised about all year – tend to be marketed as pleasurable, luxurious escapes.
“For a considered purchase like a holiday, you don’t panic someone into buying – you invite them into a daydream. And because that daydream now sells across seven months of the year rather than two, brands have to plan and produce content far further ahead than they used to.”
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