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Is Australia Another Place To Avoid For British Holidaymakers?

1 April 2009, 16:32

So where are you thinking of going on holiday this year? The events of 2008 – especially the latter half of it – may make you think twice about visiting some countries, purely because of the problems with the exchange rate.

You would have had to have been living under a rock for the last year to have missed all the problems that sterling has been having. It's easy to think that you aren't affected by these issues; after all unless you are a regular player in the Forex markets and you are trying to make money from all these changing rates, why would it matter how badly sterling is doing?

Well you might think differently if you are planning on going on holiday anywhere in the near future. The ever increasing weakness of sterling means that your money doesn't go as far as it used to in other countries – and that means your holidays are going to be more expensive now than they were previously.

Australia is a case in point. Take a look at how the exchange rate went south during the month of December.

We started the month by being able to exchange one British pound for 2.3348 Australian dollars. Now that's not too bad – but watch and see what happened next. If you were planning on an Aussie trip, that would have been the time to exchange your cash.

Two days later the exchange rate had gone below the 2.30 mark, and it never returned to that place again. There was a big dip on the 8th as well, with the exchange rate at 2.2957 on the 7th and then dropping to 2.2398 the next day. This type of sudden drop seems to be a factor in this particular pairing; although sometimes you will see it go in favour of the British pound as well. And that is what we could do with at the moment.

Things went up and down steadily for the next ten days or so, not really gaining or losing too much of note overall. Friday the 19th saw an exchange rate of 2.2041, and by the end of the Monday after that it was a distant memory… with a rate of 2.1621 at closing time.

But that wasn't the worst of the month's events. It was almost as if we were trying to see just how low we would go – and if that was the case we certainly proved the point!

The final day of 2008 saw the British pound able to claim just 2.1285. Although in fairness it could have been worse – the lowest rate for the month occurred the day before at 2.0976.

So you can see that the lure of Australia for a memorable holiday perhaps isn't quite what it was previously, thanks to the poor value of the pound at the moment. Many people will be knocking the idea of a foreign holiday on the head anyway though. They will be tightening their belts in order to make sure they can conserve cash during the downturn.

If you want to keep up with the pattern of how the exchange rates are going between the Australian dollar and the British pound, simply go to http://www.exchange-rates.org/history/AUD/GBP/G to find out the history of the two currencies.

 

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