A well-known advertisement from 1960 featured a boy in the window seat of an airliner, still in his school uniform, snorkel and flippers grasped tightly in his arms, gazing out over the clouds to the holiday that lay ahead. The slogan read unequivocally : "Picture of a man in a hurry. Be where you want to be faster: fly BOAC". It was the beginning of the jet age and the whole world would soon be in a hurry. For international tourism, jet engines meant an acceleration in the pace of travel. Just as steam engines had powered the railways of the nineteenth century and launched Thomas Cook's package tours for the middle-classes, so jet aircraft allowed working-class tourists to fly for the first time, faster and further, without the need for stop-overs or acclimatization, from the cities of northern Europe to the resorts of the Mediterranean. Thanks to jet engines European tourism became swift and sudden: breakfast in a modest of Manchester, lunch on the beach in Palma de Majorca.
This paper argues that the driving force of modern tourism has been reductions in the real cost of flying in Europe brought about by the development since the 1940s of the jet engine - arguably the single most significant invention in twentieth century transport history. Early package tours from London to Palma with piston-engined aircraft like the Douglas DC-3 carried less than 50 passengers and took over seven hours, including a refuelling stop at Lyon. Jet aircraft with over 100 passengers took half that time, thus ensuring much higher productivity: in just four years, from 1967 to 1971, the cost of inclusive tour flights to Palma fell by nearly thirty per cent in real terms thanks to the use of jet aircraft. The paper focuses on the adoption of twin-jet aircraft like the Boeing 737 and the Douglas DC-9 by independent non-scheduled airlines in Britain, Holland, Scandanavia and Germany in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It takes as a case study the charter carrier Britannia !
Airways which was one of the launch customers for the Boeing 737-200 in 1968, and one of the first airlines to get long hours out of the aircraft. And it investigates, at a broader level, why the British were the first to produce cheap package air tours in Europe and considers the role of jet engines in this pioneering branch of tourism.