How a non-London postcode shrinks your holiday options
Your holiday options vary greatly depending on where you live, new Telegraph research reveals, with Londoners enjoying more than double the non-stop flight options as people who live in Manchester, Edinburgh and Birmingham.
The study, using data supplied by OAG, shows all of the destinations you can reach from London compared with the 10 biggest regional airports, based on flight schedules for the summer of 2023 (note that several new routes announced for 2024 will change the picture slightly).
It reveals that Londoners (across five airports) have 373 options for their summer holiday destination, Manchester has 170, Edinburgh has 134, Birmingham has 118, Bristol has 106, Glasgow has 76, Newcastle has 69, Leeds-Bradford has 68, Nottingham has 65, Liverpool has 57 and Belfast has 53.
There are no surprises that London, with four of the five biggest airports in the country, is better connected than anywhere else. But the data exposes a fleet of surprising destinations that are still only served by the capital, and – on the flipside – some unlikely spots that are reachable from every corner of the country.
The destinations served by every airport
If you want to visit one of these 16 destinations, you shouldn’t have too much trouble, whether you live in Belfast, Glasgow or the East Midlands: they are accessible from London and all 10 of the regional airports covered in the study.
Three are on mainland Spain (Alicante, Barcelona, Malaga), five are Spanish islands (Fuerteventura, Ibiza, Lanzarote, Palma de Mallorca, Tenerife), while Antalya, Corfu, Faro, Jersey, Kos, Krakow, Malta and Paris make up the rest of the list.
The data solidifies what we already know: that Spain is by some margin our favourite holiday destination. In 2019, the last full “normal” year for travel before the pandemic, 18.1 million UK residents travelled there, while France received 10.3 million Britons and Italy received 5.1 million.
The destinations you can only reach from London
There are a whopping 179 destinations that you can only reach from London airports. Some are to be expected (particularly long-haul destinations like Tokyo and Perth, Australia), but there are others you would assume you could reach non-stop from at least one regional airport.
Let’s start with European cities. Biarritz, Ljubljana, Tallinn and Vilnius – each brilliant cities, well deserving of a weekend away – are only reachable from London airports. Others that connect exclusively to the capital include Zaragoza, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Dortmund.
For a winter-sun island escape, the options are limited when you travel from beyond the M25. The Caribbean favourites of Antigua and St Lucia are only accessible from London’s big airports, and it’s the same story for the Indian Ocean idylls of Mauritius and the Maldives.
Across the Atlantic, you can reach New York City, Orlando and Atlanta from London plus Edinburgh and Manchester, while Washington and Chicago are accessible via London and Edinburgh. But you can only get to Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin and Seattle direct from London. Virgin is relaunching its Manchester to Vegas route from June 2024.
The surprisingly well (and poorly) connected destinations
Verona (who knew?) has connections to London and all of the regional airports in our study except for Liverpool. The same number of major regional airports serve Rome, and fewer connect with Venice. Izmir, Turkey’s third largest city, also has connections to eight of the 10 biggest regional airports, whereas only three serve Istanbul.
Looking to fly to Bergerac in central France? You’re in luck. Six of the regional airports in our study fly to the town (that’s more than the number that serve Bordeaux). Other surprises in the list include Poznan (also with connections to six regional airports), Toulouse (four), Turin (four), Rzeszow (three) and Cluj Napoca (three).
As for the surprisingly poorly served destinations? Away from London, only two regional airports (Edinburgh and Manchester) fly to Vienna, one of Europe’s headline cities. Seville is also only served by those two regional airports, as is Helsinki, and beyond the capital, Gibraltar can only be reached via Bristol and Manchester.
The postcodes furthest from an international airport
In England, you are never too far away from an international airport. Live in central London and you have a choice of five within an hour on public transport. Live in Stoke-on-Trent and you are about an hour’s drive away from Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and East Midlands airports.
One of the corners in the country furthest from an international airport is the Cumbrian coast, around Whitehaven, just to the west of the Lake District. From here your closest airport is Newcastle, which is around 100 miles and more than two hours away by car.
Some corners of Scotland are particularly poorly connected to the wider world. The tip of the Mull of Galloway is a good two-and-a-half hour drive from Glasgow Airport. Durness, in the remote northeast of the Highlands, is a similar drive away from its nearest airport, Inverness, as is John O’Groats. Grigadale is more than four hours away from Glasgow and Inverness airports by car.
The towns along the Welsh coast have a trip on their hands, too. But the most remote, by some margin, are the settlements of the Ardnamurchan peninsula. Those who live on the remote tip of the Welsh Llŷn Peninsula are more than two-and-a-half hours from the closest airport (Liverpool or Manchester) while Aberystwyth to Cardiff, Liverpool and Birmingham airports will take you about three hours, on a good day.
