There is a whole generation of British adults who genuinely believe a holiday has always meant tapping a phone, paying £34 to a Hungarian airline and standing in a queue at Luton at half four in the morning. They think the package holiday fell out of the sky fully formed, complete with a pre-dawn drink at Weatherspoons and a complimentary neck pillow. It did not. Somebody had to invent the idea of shipping pale office workers to the Mediterranean and feeding them chips, and the story of how they managed it turns out to be far stranger than you would expect.
I should own up to my angle here. I grew up on a council estate in Farnham in the 1970s, one of four boys, and a foreign holiday sat roughly alongside an indoor swimming pool and a butler on the list of things families like ours would ever experience. So I write about the golden age of the package trip as an interested outsider… a boy with his nose pressed to the travel-agent window while other people’s dads booked a fortnight on the Costa del Sol.
The man who charged eleven people £32 to sleep in a field
The package holiday has a founding father, and his name is Vladimir Raitz. In October 1949 Raitz set up a company called Horizon Holidays, having worked out that he could charter an aircraft, fly ordinary Brits to Corsica and feeding them for a fortnight, all in, for under £35. In May 1950 he made good on it. Eleven paying passengers boarded a war-surplus Dakota at Gatwick, refuelled at Nice, and landed at Calvi to spend a fortnight in tents on a beach. The price included two meals a day and as much local wine as they could consume. The bill came to £32.50, less than half the price of a scheduled flight to Nice on its own.
There is a lovely bit of officialdom in this. By order of the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Raitz could only sell his Corsican adventure to students and teachers. So for eighteen months the entire British holiday industry consisted of geography teachers under canvas. The rule fell away in the autumn of 1951, at which point everyone else piled in.
How Spain became a suburb of Britain
Once the students and teachers had broken ground, the floodgates opened. Through the 1960s Spain looked at its empty coastline, did some quick sums and started throwing up hotels at a frankly alarming rate. Benidorm rose out of the dust. British holidaymakers would sit on a half-built terrace watching Spanish labourers finish the very hotel they had booked into.
The tour operators became household names. Clarksons, founded in 1959, sold full-board fortnights to Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece for under £40 a head. Thomson swept up a clutch of smaller firms in 1965 and built an empire. For the first time a bloke on a factory wage could stand on a foreign beach, and the country took to it with the enthusiasm of a Labrador let off the lead.
It could all go wrong, mind. In August 1974 the Court Line group collapsed, taking Clarksons and Horizon down with it and stranding thousands of sunburnt Britons abroad with worthless tickets and no way home. It remains one of the great cautionary tales of the trade, and the reason your holiday today comes wrapped in more consumer protection than a royal convoy.
Watney’s Red Barrel and the sweaty oafs from Kettering
Not everyone found it glamorous. In November 1972 Monty Python broadcast a sketch in which Eric Idle, cornered in a travel agent’s, delivers a magnificent rant against the whole business: being carted around in buses surrounded by “sweaty mindless oafs from Kettering”, staying in half-finished hotels, and discovering that the only thing on offer at the Majorcan bodega is fish, chips and a pint of Watney’s Red Barrel. The joke landed because it stung. The great British package tour had a habit of exporting Britain wholesale: the same beer and the same fish and chips, served under a sun the customers were nowhere near ready for, with the bill in pesetas.
Sir Freddie and the overnight queue
Then came Freddie Laker. On 26 September 1977 his Skytrain service took off from Gatwick to New York with a one-way fare of £32.50, roughly a third of what the flag carriers charged. There were no reservations. You turned up, you queued, and if you wanted a seat badly enough you queued overnight on the terminal floor with a flask and a sleeping bag. Within a year Skytrain had carried over a million people across the Atlantic, and in 1978 the Queen knighted him for it. A man had made flying cheap enough for ordinary people, and the establishment rewarded him… and then, a few years later, quietly helped the big airlines squeeze him out of business. But that is a story for another day.
Sunburn, sangria and the Club 18-30 rep
By now the package holiday had grown a personality, and not always a flattering one. The Horizon Group launched Club 18-30 back in 1968, aimed squarely at young singles who wanted a fortnight of sunburn and cheap sangria with none of their relatives watching. Its advertising leaned so hard into the promise of drink and romance that it became a national punchline. Somewhere along the way the phrase “lager lout abroad” entered the language, and a certain stripe of British tabloid found itself with a whole summer season’s worth of front pages.
The bit we forget when we sneer
It is easy to be snooty about all this. The flip-flops, the kiss-me-quick hats, the inflatable crocodile jammed into an overhead locker, the litre of duty-free Cinzano nobody would ever drink. But strip away the fancy dress and something genuinely remarkable sits underneath. For most of human history, a working family in this country would live and die within a few miles of where they started. Their idea of abroad came from a schoolbook or a returning soldier. Raitz, Laker and the rest handed them the horizon… the actual, literal blue horizon Raitz named his company after, seen through a filthy aeroplane window somewhere over France. That felt like a miracle, and in truth it came very close to being one.
My own family never made those early trips. But I remember the neighbours who did coming back gold-brown and insufferable, clutching a straw donkey and a bottle of Tía María, talking about a place called Lloret de Mar as though they had discovered it personally. There is a specific magic in a thing being new… in a whole country working out, all at once, that the sun shines somewhere else and you are allowed to go and stand in it. We lost some of that the day flying abroad became as routine as a trip to the recycling centre. If you want a sense of how quickly the wondrous curdles into the ordinary, I wrote more about that in why nostalgia makes the past feel better than it was.
Books for anyone who fancies a trip back
If reading this has left you wanting to climb through a scratched window into the past, that happens to be my entire line of work. In The ’86 Fix, a fed-up fortysomething is handed one weekend back in 1986 to sort his life out, Texan bars and Space Invaders included. Tuned Out sends a stressed millennial to 1969 to find out whether his parents’ generation really had it easier, with an ending capable of reducing grown adults to tears on public transport. And No Easy Deeds drops a young estate agent into the recession-bruised Britain of 1990, where the past turns out to be a good deal less safe than it looks.
None of them contain a single pint of Watney’s Red Barrel.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who invented the package holiday?
Vladimir Raitz is widely credited as its founder. He set up Horizon Holidays in October 1949 and ran the first mass package trip in May 1950, flying eleven paying passengers from Gatwick to Corsica for £32.50 all in, tents and local wine included.
When did package holidays become popular in Britain?
The real boom arrived through the 1960s and 1970s, once Spain began building purpose-built resorts like Benidorm and operators such as Clarksons and Thomson offered full-board fortnights for well under £40. Cheap charter flights put a foreign beach within reach of ordinary wages for the first time.
What did flying abroad feel like before budget airlines?
Slower, dearer and far more of an occasion. Passengers dressed up, propeller aircraft made refuelling stops, and a seat cost a small fortune until pioneers like Freddie Laker arrived. Laker’s Skytrain launched in September 1977 with £32.50 one-way fares to New York and no bookings… you simply queued, sometimes overnight.
When did easyJet start?
easyJet took its first flight on 10 November 1995, from Luton to Glasgow, with one-way fares fixed at £29. Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou founded the airline that year with a single leased aircraft, 77 staff and a £5 million loan from his father.
Where did Club 18-30 come from?
The Horizon Group launched Club 18-30 in 1968 to sell package holidays to young single travellers who wanted a break without family in tow. Its drink-and-romance advertising made it famous, and eventually notorious, and it came to define a certain rowdy strain of the British holiday abroad.