As Europe shivers in the cold, its residents are dreaming of sunny getaways and foreign adventures. Not only dreaming but booking their 2025 breaks in record numbers, according to the travel industry.

January is often a busy month for travel bookings as holiday companies tout tempting deals to rival the high street’s New Year offers. But there’s one particular day that traditionally sees a flurry of bookings, and this year it was last Saturday.

Dubbed ‘Sunshine Saturday’ by British travel agents, the first Saturday after the first full week in January typically sees more bookings than any other day this month.

2025 has been no exception, with multiple travel companies logging record sales last weekend. Does that mean all the deals are already gone, or is there a better time to book your 2025 travel?

Record sales across multiple travel companies

Tour operator Hays Travel broke records on both Saturday and Sunday, with more than a third of bookings made by customers new to the company.

“People continue to prioritise their annual holiday and we are seeing a small upturn in average spend,” says Jonathon Woodall-Johnston, Hays Chief Operating Officer.

British self-catering provider Hoseasons had a booming weekend too, with lodge and park bookings up 19 per cent on Sunday 12 January. The only day with more sales in its history was the day the UK relaxed its COVID lockdown restrictions in 2021.

Its sister brand, cottages.com, also had a record day on Sunday. Bookings for spring breaks were up 25 per cent year-on-year, the company says, noting a high demand for properties with hot tubs.

Adventure travel is in demand too, with Dnata Travel Group’s adventure brand Incredible Journeys recording its best-ever day for calls and bookings.

Incredible Journeys said that, on Monday 13 January, they took 37 per cent more calls than the same day last year. Japan, up 80 per cent, was the fastest-growing destination booked, alongside Kenya and Sri Lanka.

In fact, across the Dnata Travel Group, which also includes Gold Medal, Pure Luxury and Cruise Plus, all the brands had a record-breaking start to the year.

“Our brands have seen a strong start to peaks,” said Simon Applebaum, Managing Director of Dnata Travel Group. “Our web sales are +40 per cent year on year which is really promising to see.”

Should you book your 2025 travel early?

UK travel company Barrhead Travel reported that, even in the first week of January, bookings had overtaken the demand they saw in 2024. Sales are mostly for summer 2025, although December is also selling well.

“January remains one of the best times to book a holiday as it’s the time of year where most operators, airlines and cruise lines offer significant savings and added value,” notes Jacqueline Dobson, President of Barrhead Travel.

“With demand for travel at an all-time high, booking early also means that you’re more likely to get your first choice of accommodation.”

Consumer company Which? stresses the importance of booking early too. Research published last year showed that a week-long holiday in Portugal would save around €200 when booked eight months in advance compared with two weeks out.

Holidays to Italy in the peak August weeks could be €165 per person cheaper eight months out, and Croatia attracted a €115 saving under the same rule.

When is the best time to book 2025 travel?

Package holiday seekers could benefit from this eight-month rule when booking for summer 2025.

Which? considered the price of some 24,000 package holidays, noting that “it’s no surprise that the biggest average savings, of the eight months we tracked prices for, were for bookings made in December or January.”

But there was an anomaly in the data, and it related to some of the most popular destinations in Europe. For the Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, mainland Spain and Turkey, a second booking window in May was shown to be even cheaper than early-year booking.

In Bulgaria and Cyprus, booking just weeks before departure was where the cheapest price point lay. Which? Explained this saying it was “probably because tour operators had overestimated the demand for these destinations.”

When it comes to unpackaged holidays, booking site Kayak has some advice on when to book, and when to stay.

For a city break, starting a hotel stay on a Sunday can be lucrative. The travel site’s data shows a 7 per cent saving over other days of the week. Fridays should be avoided, with average prices coming in 8 per cent higher.

Resort hotels and leisure stays benefit from midweek arrivals, with prices for a Tuesday up to 4 per cent cheaper than the average. Thursday is the most popular day to check in, commanding a 2 per cent price uptick as a result.

Flexibility pays, and leaving it until the last minute can unlock significant savings.

“Hotel pricing doesn’t favour planners,” says Kayak. “One reason is that hotels typically have a 24- to 48-hour cancellation window. When travellers cancel close to their date, the hotel would rather put heads in beds than leave the room empty.

Booking platform VRBO assessed booking trends in the holiday home market. It recommends booking in February, noting “By April, over 70 per cent of summer stays will be booked.”

It also recommended opting for a ‘shoulder season’ stay – the periods just outside the high season, where good weather can still be had but at a fraction of the cost. Longer stays can also attract a 10 per cent discount, says VRBO.

The site evaluated that, for the Easter holidays, the best time to book is 20 January, with bookings made no later than 3 March.

For summer holidays, booking on the 17 February is recommended, with bookings made no later than 28 April.

When to travel to avoid the crowds

Analysis by aviation intelligence company OAG found that, over the past 15 years, all the busiest air travel days have fallen between 20 July and mid-August (apart from the pandemic years).

In particular, peaks in air travel demand were seen on the second Friday in August, with the first Friday in August also a busy day.

Flying on a Friday in early August isn’t guaranteed to be busy, but travellers are more likely to encounter long queues at airports, and the risk of delays and cancellations runs higher.

Spain is planning to introduce a 100 per cent tax on properties bought by non-EU residents in its latest move to protect the housing market from foreign buyers.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the “unprecedented” new tax was needed to solve the country’s housing crisis. In recent years, rents have skyrocketed in Airbnb-dominated cities like Barcelona and Madrid and people’s incomes have failed to keep up.

Pressure on Spain’s housing market has been exacerbated by overtourism and the proliferation of short-term holiday rentals. The country’s Tourism Ministry has just announced that a record 94 million internationaltravellers visited Spainin 2024, the best year for tourism in the country since records started.

As upset over overtourism grows, the government has been pushed into action in an attempt to solve the housing crisis.

How will Spain’s property tax affect foreign buyers?

Non-EU residents bought 27,000 properties “not to live in” but “to make money from” in 2023, Sanchez said. Sales of homes to foreigners, including EU citizens, make up roughly 15 per cent of the housing market according to the Spanish property registry.

The move, Sanchez said, is designed to prioritise homes for residents.

The new tax won’t make it impossible for non-EU residents to buy homes but will likely mean it isn’t financially viable for many considering purchasing a property in the country. Sánchez also didn’t provide a timeline or details on how he plans to implement the tax.

The new tax won’t affect EU residents due to Spain’s obligations as a member of the bloc. And, if you already own a property in the country, you likely won’t be impacted by the new policy. It can’t be taken from you but the government could add extra capital gains taxes in the future.

Spain tackles tourism to solve housing crisis

Spain has already been cracking down on tourism in response to the housing crisis with some cities looking to ban Airbnb-style rentals entirely.

In June last year, Barcelona City Council announced a plan to rid the city of tourist flat licenses by 2028. The city hasn’t actually granted any new licenses since 2014 when it froze the supply at around 10,000 units.

Rental prices have been driven up, in part, because of these short-term contracts mainly offered to tourists. Other measures proposed by the government include higher taxes on these holiday rentals.

Residents of Barcelona have organised protests against overtourism, with around 3,000 people taking to the streets in July last year shouting “tourists go home” and spraying them with water.

Protests have also taken place in the Balearics and Canary Islands. Further actions against high rents in November – though less specifically targeted at tourists – also identified overtourism as a driver.

Rental prices have been driven up, in part, because of these short-term contracts mainly offered to tourists.

At the beginning of this year, Spain made moves to axe its golden visa programme by April. An investment of €500,000 into real estate offers wealthy foreigners the chance to gain residency and live, work and study in the country. Residency in Spain also grants you the right to visa-free travel within the Schengen Area, which includes most of the EU, making this an even more appealing offer.

Like elsewhere in Europe, this scheme has been somewhat too successful driving up property prices in city centres like Barcelona and making housing unaffordable for many local residents.

Delayed flights are nothing new, but Australian airline Qantas has come up with a rather novel excuse for late departures. It says its services between Sydney and Johannesburg are being delayed because of falling space junk.

The flights cross a portion of the southern Indian Ocean that US launch company SpaceX has earmarked for the splashdown of re-entering rockets.

Qantas says it often gets little notice of when or where it can expect rockets to fall from the sky, and as such, has regularly delayed flights to ensure safety.

“Over the past few weeks we‘ve had to delay several flights between Johannesburg and Sydney due to advice received from the US Government regarding the re-entry of SpaceX rockets over an extensive area of the Southern Indian Ocean,” Qantas told Euronews Travel.

“While we try to make any changes to our schedule in advance, the timing of recent launches have moved around at late notice which has meant we’ve had to delay some flights just prior to departure. Our teams notify customers of changes to their flight as soon as we know it will be impacted.”

How long are the space junk delays?

“In the past few weeks, many flights have departed late in both directions, some more than five hours late, with the obvious knock-on impacts of this,” commented Dr James Pearson, a flight route analyst.

“It is unclear whether all or only some of the delays relate to the SpaceX debris. Nonetheless, like all airlines, Qantas revolves around safety, and it took precautionary action.”

Comparing notes between flight tracking service Flightradar 24 and SpaceX’s calendar of launches, there does seem to be a correlation between delayed flights and Falcon 9 launches.

For example, a flight on January 10, set to depart Johannesburg at 5:15 pm was delayed by five and a half hours, eventually taking off at 10:41pm. That same day, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 with 21 Starlink satellites onboard from Cape Canaveral at 2:11 pm local time, just a couple of hours after the flight was due to take off.

How much space junk does a SpaceX rocket produce?

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has famously developed a reusable rocket it calls the Falcon 9. The first stages return to Earth to be used again, but a huge 3.5-tonne upper section remains in orbit, joining the swarms of space debris that circle the planet.

Eventually, it falls back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere in the process. But these aluminium rocket parts aren’t always destroyed on re-entry. Numerous reports have been made of pieces of Falcon 9 rockets turning up on beaches and even in people’s homes.

In November 2015, a piece of a Falcon 9 measuring 10 metres by four metres washed up on the shores of the Scilly Isles in the UK.

A piece of debris from a Falcon 9 launch crashed into a private farm in central Washington in 2021. The piece was described as being 1.5 metres long and cylindrical, and it made a crater in the ground around 13 cm deep.

Just last year, multiple pieces of debris were discovered throughout the mountains of North Carolina, which were subsequently confirmed to be from a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft.

And in 2022, junk found in the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales, Australia, was confirmed to be of SpaceX origin.

The company has set up a hotline for anyone discovering debris from SpaceX spacecraft, explaining that, “If you believe you have identified a piece of debris, please do not attempt to handle or retrieve the debris directly. Instead, please either email or leave a voicemail here with your name, number and a brief description of what you have discovered and where.”

Is space junk affecting other flights and is it dangerous?

Very few airlines connect Australia and South Africa. Just two carriers have direct flights – Qantas and South African Airways (SAA). But Qantas flies to Sydney, in the southeast of Australia, while SAA connects to Perth on the west coast.

Because of the differences in destinations, only Qantas takes a route that puts it in the path of falling debris.

“Qantas’ Sydney-Johannesburg Airbus A380 service follows a very southerly route,” Dr Pearson explained. “As South African Airways’ Johannesburg-Perth service follows a much more northerly route, it seems that only Qantas has primarily been impacted.”

But is space junk really dangerous for commercial air travel? While there may not have been an immediate danger to Qantas flights, airlines tend to operate out of an abundance of caution, so would always rather delay a flight than take unnecessary risks.

“Customers generally understand this is outside of airlines’ control and that we can’t fly in the area when the rocket re-entry is taking place,” a Qantas spokesperson told Euronews Travel. “We’re in contact with SpaceX to see if they can refine the areas and time windows for the rocket re-entries to minimise future disruption to our passengers on the route.”

It would be very unlucky for a piece of space junk, even one several metres across, to hit an aircraft flying at hundreds of kilometres an hour. But it could happen, and should that piece of junk puncture the fuselage or enter the engine, it could be disastrous.

For Qantas, the situation is somewhat controlled as it receives warnings specifying geographical locations and timings of re-entry. But not all re-entries go to plan, which creates a risk for other airlines that might not be so well informed.

The Aerospace Corporation states that some 200 – 400 pieces of space debris fall to Earth each year – and those are just the ones that are big enough to track. That problem is only going to get worse as more nations look to send satellites into space.

As well as rocket bodies, dead satellites are also a problem the world will soon have to face. SpaceX alone has already put more than 7,000 satellites into orbit and plans to grow this fleet to 34,000. As these spacecraft come to the end of their service life, they too will be deorbited and fall to Earth.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is working on legislation around space debris, but it’s a tricky situation that likely won’t be resolved soon.