School Holidays

[John Borg]

Knowing that school holidays are "peak times" for holiday bookings, can someone please give me a general indication of when school holidays are held in different countries throughout Europe? I know from experience that early October is popular with the Germans and Swiss, mid July/August with just about all of central Europe etc.
Family holidays are determined by when the kids are off from school, more than when the parent/s can get away from work, so it would be interesting to know the different holiday patterns in different countries.

[paolo]

John,

I have found these two documents that tell you the school holidays for most countries in Europe.

Country by country:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/education/pol ... ce_en.html

And if you want to see all countries in a table format, that is here in a pdf document:
http://www.eurydice.org/Documents/Time7/en/FrameSet.htm

I have not gone through them, so if you find anything interesting please let us know. Perhaps some countries have unusual holiday times which are outside of your own peak booking times - making them good places to target for those times.

[John Borg]

thanks Paolo. I have gone through both sites and they are very precise and informative.
In fact, in my next life, I will definately be a teacher! Browsing through the dates, I can now see a pattern forming in relation to my bookings throughout certain periods throughout the year.
Apart from the holiday period issue, I have learnt by past experience that most of my repeat clients are nearly always families with children. Children obviously have a determining influence on their parents' choice of holiday destination, especially if the last destination was enjoyable for them!

[A-two]

I'm particularly interested in promoting half term breaks for summer and autumn 2005 to UK visitors. Is there a week between Easter and end of school year? Also, autumn half term is showing October 23rd thru November 4th for 2004. Can I assume the same for 2005?

Thanks for the help.

Joanna
www.propertyangels.com

[musicmonkey]

I have the dates for my area (East Sussex) for 2005. We are moving to a 6 term year from September 2005.

2004/2005

14th to 18th Feb - Half term.
24th Mar to 8 April - Easter
30th May to 3rd June - Half term (Whitsun)
25th July to 2nd Sept - Summer holiday

2005/2006

24th Oct to 28th Oct - Half term
19th Dec to 2nd Jan - Xmas
13th Feb to 17th Feb - Half term
3rd April to 18th April - Easter
29th May to 2nd June - Half term (Whitsun)
27th July to ?? (dates not published yet)

Hope this helps. Note the later date that the summer holiday starts in 2006!

[sleekitbeastie]

We are moving to a 6 term year from September 2005.

It's been a while since I was at school. What is the difference between a 6 term year and a 3 term year with each term split into 2 - which could be called a 6 (half-)term year?

[musicmonkey]

The idea is that the school terms are of pretty much equal length. This could mean that the holidays won't necessarily coincide with certain Bank holidays, Easter for example. The summer holiday will be shorter too.

As a parent of school age children, I am disappointed about this new development as we are fined and castigated if we take the children out of school during term time, but with only 4-5 weeks of 'summer' holiday there will be so much more competition for those weeks. There are not too many warm destinations for other times of the year perhaps with the exception of the week in June.

[HolidayWebs]

Essex is also changing its terms but our 'spring break' (no longer at Easter) is now from 11 Apr for 2 weeks which I found out when I nearly booked a ski trip at Easter which is now only a Bank Holiday weekend for us. So there'll be quite a lot of variety this year.

We often get Scottish families in July as their Summer holidays are earlier than England.