School holiday flights: Stagger summer and half-term holidays to cut soaring prices, urges aviation expert

How to reduce soaring flight and package prices during school holidays: spread the hols and change the rules on flight slots, says aviation expert.

The 8.10am easyJet flight from London Gatwick to Geneva on 8 February 2025, coming back a week later at 11.10am, is selling for £85 return. But a week later the fare for identical flights on Britain’s biggest budget airline leaps to £928 – 11 times higher – as families desperate for skiing holidays in the Alps drive up prices.

Parents of school-age children are painfully aware of the high cost of travel outside term time. Research shows more parents are prepared to accept the £80 fine for unauthorised absences in return for saving many hundreds or thousands of pounds.

Pepe Di’Iasio, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, has called “for government intervention to introduce some restraint on the extent to which travel firms are able to put up their prices”.

Writing in TES (formerly the Times Educational Supplement), he said: “It does feel as though the market has been allowed to run riot and now effectively exploits the situation to maximum advantage.

“It is difficult to believe that the astonishing mark-ups on travel during school holiday periods could not be controlled to some extent.”

But a leading aviation expert has warned that price regulation would traumatise the travel industry. Jonathan Hinkles, former chief executive of Loganair, said: “Most airlines make profits during the summer and lose money in the winter – if they cannot make a profit in summer, they will go out of business.”

He warned: “Any conceivable model to regulate airline and/or holiday pricing in peak season will cause market failures if airlines are no longer able to make summer profits to sustain themselves through winter.”

In addition, accommodation providers overseas who were asked to cut their rates because of a ‘cap’ on UK package holiday prices would simply sell the rooms to families from other countries.

Instead, Mr Hinkles has called for school holidays dates to be spread across a wider range of weeks, and for airline slot allocations to be more flexible in late March and late October – usually coinciding with the Easter and autumn half-term holidays.

Speaking to The Independent’s travel podcast, he said holiday…