Despite this, Richard Cooper from ‘Carefree Travel’ in Enniskillen has confidence that “people will want to travel again” sooner rather than later. 

Speaking to the Herald Mr Cooper explaiend; “It has been a very difficult three months because there’s two or three of us that are self-employed and we have been in the office working everyday behind the scenes.”

Staff at ‘Carefree Travel’ returned back to work on Friday following Stormont’s decision to reopen all non-essential businesses. “We had 400 to 500 bookings with people travelling this summer time between families and people abroad needing to get back into the country. We needed to rearrange and cancel holidays by going through the process of getting refunds. 

“Lucky enough we are about 75% of our way through that and hopefully by the end of this week or next week there will be good news on quarantine being lifted, so we’re looking forward to that to give us the confidence to get up and running again. 

“We have a duty of care to our customers and understandably a majority of them did not want to travel this summer or alternatively changed their holidays to next summer – so all of that has kept us very busy. To be honest we haven’t had a minute over lockdown.”

Speaking on his hopes for the future, Richard said, “We’re absolutely staying positive. People have got so used to travelling and everybody will want to travel again. Yes, it might take while to build their confidence up but undoubtedly people will want to travel again. 

“Even during lockdown we’ve had people ringing to book holidays, especially ski and winter holidays such as city breaks. Just last week we even had people ringing to book cruises and families enquiring if they could even get away this summer, so there is confidence out there and people are really wanting to get away.”