Goodbye 2021 Hello 2022 Holidays

In some very POSITIVE news, we have today uploaded our DATES FOR 2022 to our website – and over the coming days we will also ensure that the availability is accurate once we incorporate all of our deferred guests! We expect that the current muddiness of the International Travel situation will be resolved once the 2021 summer season ends (we in the industry suspect the current situation is being engineered to dissuade UK travellers to leave the UK) – and with our now world-leading vaccincation rates we expect travel to be allowed to return towards normal, with testing requirements very much reduced, a reduction of amber lists and far cheaper testing becoming available. It is also highly likely that fully vaccinated travellers may not longer have to test at all in the near future…all of these things should allow travel to resume with almost normality in the very near future! If you book now you can do so at current-year prices, and miss any price rises that may be applied soon!

Unfortunately we sadly continue to see the enormous impacts of Covid-19 on International travel this summer (2021), and following recent delays, announcements and consumer confidence falling within the travel industry we have been communicating once again with our booked guests regarding their plans and thoughts, and have been forced once again to come to a devastating decision.

The remainder of our weeks in 2021 will no longer be going ahead – meaning that this is our second year without being able to operate due to Covid, and more recently due to a lack of UK governmental support to assist consumers in resuming travel with any real reassurance. It really should not be this hard – but the government seem determined to add complexity, expense and uncertainty to the situation. Many people want to travel, but are not certain of how to do so, or are fearful of sudden changes to the system making trips non-viable, or even worse, leaving them stranded outside the UK. This lack of certainty is having a huge knock-on effect on our sector – even major flight operators are continuing to cancel or change dozens of flights.

Unfortunately the continuing difficulties, and a seemingly deliberate absence of clear governmental communication regarding international travel have been having a significant effect on people’s confidence and willingness to travel. Currently many European governments state that travel is allowed (although in some countries this is restricted to essential travel) – but the UK government itself continues to make consumers feel that they should not travel for tourism, and have made some very odd judgements with which nations should be on the “Green List”. Many countries with very similar or better statistics than the UK are not on the green list – which creates question marks over why the list has not been significantly expanded, the validity of personal insurances if people travel for tourism purposes and how to plan a trip when announcements are so last-moment.

Once you factor in the above with the continuing cancellation of flights by many airlines it is very easy to see why confidence in ability to travel abroad this year is very low- despite our excellent vaccination programme.

Therefore, as mentioned, we have now communicated with all of our guests who are booked to visit this summer to discuss their thoughts, worries and preferences for the summer ahead. It’s a devastating situation to once again find oursleves in, but we can absolutely understand why so many people are not wanting to leave international travel plans in place during such a period of indecision and uncertainty – and, as always we have worked very hard with the many, many guests who we had booked in for 2021 to ensure that we offered solutions to suit them. As a result, nearly all of our guests for 2021 have now postponed their trips to 2022.

In the meantime many of our guests have expressed an interest in our UK-based guiding, so we have reintroduced our Snowdonia-based North Wales trips, on a guiding-only basis. We have now run several of these on our amazing local trails, and interest continues to be high! We live in North Wales, and have been riding here for decades (our first ever STS guided guests came here back in 2010) – and as a result we know all of the local secrets, the best of the wild mountain routes and lots of hidden riding just away from the trail centres which you’d never discover alone…details are all on our website right here – prepare to ride some amazing singletrack without leaving the country! And yes, you can transfer onto this from an Andorra trip if you prefer!

Many thanks to all of our friends and guests from around the World for standing by us, and we cannot wait to get to Andorra with you in 2022!

Martin