I bought a Starbucks coffee this morning and was surprised to get it half price. @RishiSunak kindly used £1.45 of taxpayers money to give me a discount I wasn’t expecting and didn’t need.
There are nearly 1,000 Starbucks in the UK each, I guess, selling about 200 coffees a day.

That’s 200,000 coffees at £1.45 each so £290K discount per day... let’s call that £2M per week.
Remember that number: Two million pounds per week on coffees for people who were probably going to buy a coffee anyway and who probably weren’t expecting to get it cheap.
Like me.

Meanwhile, the outbound travel industry has been decimated. COVID-19 has brought a whole sector to its knees. With almost no new revenue being generated, jobs are being lost at an alarming rate. Unlike the UK restaurant sector, travel businesses have had no additional support.

The average salary in travel is just over £26k a year or about £500 per week.
Now remember how much those reduced price coffees are costing the taxpayer? It’s the equivalent of saving the jobs of 4,000 people employed in overseas travel... and that’s just Starbucks.

The money being spent in total would protect almost all travel jobs until it’s safe to travel abroad on holiday again.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a coffee and don’t doubt that cafés and restaurants need the support but travel jobs and travel people matter too.

So, next time you’re served a discounted coffee maybe take a second to think of the last overseas holiday you had, and then think about the people that helped to make it happen. And then ask yourself why there’s no support for them.

And if you think that’s wrong then maybe let your MP know.
Right now, the most important thing is saving lives, so foreign holidays are on hold for a while, but when this is over we’ll all be glad of a break... maybe even more than a coffee?
That’s why we need to #savetravel!

Correction: the 50% discount only applies Mon-Wed so figures are a bit suspect.
But hey, you get the point!