Villas, apartments and holiday home renting

Now that the no-frills scheduled airlines such as Easyjet and Ryanair have cemented their position in the UK outbound leisure market, it is difficult to remember just ten years ago UK charter flights were still essentiallydominated by the traditional timeshare changeover days.

Alicante was Saturday and Tuesday, Palma Majorca was the same, Las Palma tended to be Monday, Tenerife Tuesday and so on. Only Thomson with their in-house carrier Britannia, as it was known then, broke the mould. They could afford to, they had huge blocks of beds which they would back-to-back into fleets of their aircraft which would arrive on non-traditional changeover days within a couple of hours of each other. A marvellous feat of co-ordination.

Anyway back to the point, which is that those days are now over. No-frills airlines - ok let's drop the pretence andjust call them scheduled airlines - now fly whenever they can get a slot which suits them. Destinations such as Majorca, Malaga, Alicante and Faro have daily services, with long weekend and short breaks the norm.

Hoteliers are adjusting to the shock of not having tour operators conveniently managing their bed planning for them. They should do - they are hotels. But the holiday property owner who wants to maintain a decent occupancy and yield has to join in too, as the competition for clients intensifies and margins get tighter.