Cornwall’s bank holiday spending surge outpaces rest of UK

If you’re heading down the A30 this weekend, you won’t be alone. Traffic chiefs are braced for one of the heaviest bank holiday weekends on the roads in more than a decade, with an estimated 20 million UK staycations taking place by car. And new figures suggest Cornwall is about to feel that surge in its tills more than anywhere else in the country.

The numbers behind the surge

The data comes from global contactless payment firm SumUp, drawn from tens of thousands of card transactions across the UK’s tourism hotspots. It compares spending during bank holiday week against a control period 12 weeks earlier, across cafés, restaurants, bars, hotels and tourism-related transactions, to isolate exactly how much of a boost the holiday itself brings.

Nationally, spend in staycation hotspots was up 24% over the May bank holiday weekend compared with the control period, itself a jump on the 14% growth recorded the year before. Every hotspot SumUp looked at beat that national average. Cornwall beat it by the widest margin of all, with spending up 149% over the May bank holiday, more than six times the national rate.

SumUp is using that May weekend as the benchmark for what to expect from this week’s August bank holiday, and says the pattern points to one of the busiest bank holidays on record for Britain’s coastal high streets.

Where the money went

The category-level detail shows where Cornwall’s spending actually landed. Hotel and accommodation bookings grew by 13% in 2025 but jumped to 286% growth this year. Café and restaurant spend rose from 147% growth in 2025 to 160% in 2026. Bar and club spending grew 115% in 2025 and 45% in 2026.

That points to a shift as much as a straightforward rise, with beds and tables filling up fastest while the bar takings grow at a steadier pace.

Why it’s happening now

Corin Camensich, Global Marketing & Brand Strategy Lead at SumUp, puts the shift down to two forces pulling in the same direction. Rising jet fuel costs have made flying abroad noticeably pricier, pushing households who might otherwise book a last-minute Mediterranean break to look closer to home. At the same time, another brutal summer of heat across southern Europe has made Britain’s coast look less like a compromise and more like the smart choice.

“What we saw in May wasn’t a slow, steady recovery for coastal high streets, it was a step-change,” Corin said. “Places like Blackpool and Brighton were barely growing twelve months ago, and this year they jumped by more than 20 points in a single bank holiday weekend.”

“The jet fuel crisis has made flying abroad noticeably more expensive, so households who’d normally book a last-minute Mediterranean break are looking closer to home instead. At the same time, you’ve got the ‘coolcation’ effect. Southern Europe’s had another brutal summer heat-wise, and suddenly Britain’s famously rubbish weather doesn’t look like such a joke anymore, it looks like a reason to book. Put those two things together and that’s your step-change. Not a one-off.”

What the survey and the searches say

The transaction data lines up with what people are telling pollsters and typing into Google. A SumUp and YouGov survey of 2,000 Brits found that one in five say they can’t afford to travel abroad this year, and a further 16% are working with a smaller travel budget than usual.

Search interest in “UK staycations” has nearly doubled between May 2025 and May 2026, according to Google Trends. As Corin put it: “Card spending tells us what people are already doing, and search data tells us what they’re planning to do next. Both are pointing in exactly the same direction heading into next week.”

“If that holds into next week, we’d expect some of these towns to have their busiest August bank holiday in years,” Corin added.

So if the queues on the A30 feel worse than usual this weekend, the tills on the seafront may well tell the same story.