The warm spring weather in England makes me nostalgic for the days of the package tour to the sun. Britannia Airways was one of the airlines that stood out in the crowd.
The airline component of package tours was provided by Britannia Airways. The most prestigious airliner in the world, a graceful flagship for the likes of BOAC and TWA, was overtaken by it in 1962, but it was based at the airport at the time. Four Avro Yorks and eightConnies were flown by Euravia by 1964. The name Britannia Airways was changed to mark the occasion, as Euravia re-equipped with another cast-off from the late propeller age, the Bristol Britannia.
The Britannias saw the airline through the rest of the 1960s, as it was purchased by Lord Thompson, a newspaper magnate who wanted to benefit the general public. He wanted to run a package tour operator for Britons to travel abroad for the first time.
Britannia was the first airline in Europe to buy the Boeing plane in 1968, even though the government wanted them to buy British.
Britannia got into the long haul business in the 70s with a pair of Boeing 707s. In those days of tight regulation protecting state-owned national carriers, budget travelers flew on leisure airlines operating affinity charters for travel clubs and other special interest groups, with backdated membership cards given out on the day.
Britannia was Britain's largest leisure airline by 1972 and had a fleet of thirteen planes.
Mediterranean holidays became affordable due to Britain's booming economy and the discovery of North Sea oil.
The skylines of resort coastlines in Spain, Greece, and Italy raced skyward, as young singles and couples flew aboard to party, and families to find a slice of get-away-from-it-all paradise. The neon fashion of the era was soundtracked with new Walkman person stereos.
It is hard to imagine a world without the Persian Gulf mega-carriers, but as recently as the 1990s, the UK to Australia market was dominated by Qantas with two jumbo jets a day to London. One of the biggest VFR markets in the world is served by Britannia, which started flying 767s to Australia via Singapore and Sharjah in 1988 and has continued ever since.
There was a more ambitious leisure clientele in the 90s. British tourists went to the Caribbean and Thailand to see the white sands and palm trees. Britannia's flying was long haul by 1997. Britannia introduced a premium cabin, similar to that of the best scheduled airlines in Europe, to meet the expectations of their most demanding customers.
Thanks to harmonisation of regulations made possible by European Union integration, Europe's airline market was deregulated in the mid 1990s which gave rise to the Low Cost Carrier, theLCC. The advent of the internet made it possible for travelers to book their own accommodations, and no longer needed a tour operator to make the arrangements.
easyJet went from a pair of ex-GB Airways smokers to over 300 A320 family Airbus aircraft, and from a handful of Romanian-built BAC-111s to 500 Boeing 737-800s, fleet sizes that dwarfed not
The British aviation brand Britannia Airways was bought by the German travel giant in 2000 and was renamed Thomsonfly in 2004. A merger with First Choice Airways resulted in the consolidation of the airlines.
The joys of the 1980s inclusive package tour, when international travel was much less accessible to the average person, might seem a bit pedestrian compared to the free range possibilities of today, but whatever they lacked in variety or local authenticity, they made up for with a bit of innocence and wide eyed Britannia Airways was the only British airline that played their role as well as they could.
The cover image is from Wikimedia Commons.
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