Climate change has turned our entire holiday calendar on its head
Almost three months ago, in the second half of July, I did something reckless. I was aware of what I was doing, I understood the consequences, and yet I did it anyway.
What, you may ask? Well, I gathered my family and drove us to the airport – where we boarded a plane to a Greek island that had been a fixture on TV news channels, and in publications like this, all week, because it was on fire. On the island of Evia, and on the outer flanks of Athens, locals and -tourists were being evacuated from around the smoke-choked town of Loutraki, 50 miles west of the capital.
The evacuations had stopped – and so had the fire – by the time we passed through the area five days after the flames had burst loose. But only just. It wasn’t difficult to spot the charred landscape on the north side of the EO8 highway near Corinth, the one road we could plausibly take from Athens to the southern Peloponnese – where our villa awaited.
Still, we succeeded in reaching Foinikounta, where I spent the rest of the week checking the headlines as relentlessly as I had monitored them from London. By Tuesday, Rhodes was in hell, while social media brought grim rumours of further blazes on every hillside.
Could we even make it back to Athens, I wondered, scanning the horizon for clouds of black? It was hard to say. For the first four days of the holiday, we couldn’t even make it out of the villa – so fierce was the 40C sun that loitered menacingly outside.
I mention this now because I have been drawn back to that scene by the weather reports of the last few days: the wheezing of the air-conditioning as it struggled with its task; the whining of my nine-year-old, banned from the pool until sunset; the almost physical strength of the heat at midday; the delaying of dinner until after 10pm, because only then was it practical to sit outside a restaurant without requiring a change of clothing.
Admittedly, there is scarcely any more comfort, from a -climate-change perspective, in the Mediterranean shore “basking” in the upper 20C at the start of - -Oct-ober, just after Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland have recorded their hottest Septembers on record. But I would be lying if I said I hadn’t looked at the 28C forecast for Athens this weekend, and thought “well, that would have been perfect 10 weeks ago”.
The dominant travel question of the next few years will not be “Where should I go on holiday?” so much as “When?” Have we reached the point where – certainly in terms of southern Europe – high summer has ceased to be high season? Might we not be better – if we want a getaway where we can -actually enjoy the beach rather than have to burrow into it to avoid the ultraviolet rays – to eschew July and August for September and October? Or maybe for April or May, when the school holidays will facilitate such a seasonal shift?
In some senses, the change is already under way. To pick a couple of examples, you can still book a holiday to Corfu for 2023 via British Airways – packages are available until the last week of this month; easyJet now offers flights to Crete until the first week of November. Whether this becomes the norm relies on resorts staying open until later in the year (or unshuttering earlier) – but as with many things, -market forces will have their say.
If the general response to what has been a summer of attritional temper-atures is to look instead to the Mediterranean autumn for sunshine, and to more northerly countries (Germany, Austria, the Scandinavian nations) during July – both these thoughts occurred to me as I cowered in my Peloponnese bolthole – then the travel industry will adjust by default.
Perhaps, in a decade’s time, May and October will be subject to the highest travel prices – and the complaints about school-holiday exploitation that they always attract – while the savvy tourist scans the deal sites for that cheap (but infernal) August “escape”.
Have you changed your travel plans to coincide with the weather this year? Let us know in the comments below
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