Many of you reading this will be or have already taken a summer holiday here in the UK, rather than endure the frustrations and increased cost of the Covid related travel restrictions imposed by many governments. Having endured a torrid time since March 2020, a part of the UK’s hotel sector is currently experiencing record booking levels, as are those who have pivoted towards the serviced accommodation sector in seaside and rural locations.

Those operating in many inland city centres will not have been seeing such a positive occupancy trend of late and the absence of large numbers of overseas visitors to the UK is also still evident. However, in just a few weeks’ time we will be into September with many office workers expected to gradually return to work and our city centres could well see increased activity with business travel and hotel reservations likely to increase.

At the same time the UK’s universities will see a new academic year commence and a key question is how many student landlords will be welcoming overseas students to their accommodation given ongoing travel restrictions. The above just underlines that despite the success of the UK’s vaccination programme we are not yet ‘out of the woods’.