Olympics already boosting Scots tourism businesses

Revealing a 32 per cent jump in forward summer bookings for Scotland, Andy Washington, the firm’s managing director in the UK and Ireland, said people were “looking for alternative routes into London for the Olympics”.

Glasgow will host five days’ worth of football matches at Hampden Park, though two of those will be before the Games’ opening ceremony.

“It’s very expensive to stay in London,” Washington added, “so it may be that people will go for a day or two to see the events they have tickets for, and then spend the rest of their time elsewhere in the UK.”

Commenting on the sharp year-on-year rise in bookings for July, Washington said: “It is a unique number that we have not seen any other year.”

The summer surge comes amid broader growth for Expedia, which saw a 10 per cent rise in the number of people booking into Scotland through its website in 2011.

Washington said that trend had continued into the current year, with bookings in January up by a similar level, bucking a broader decline for the industry.

Expedia believes that the resurgant popularity of “staycations” is helping to drive its growth.

“People are tightening the purse strings, but it is not stopping them from going on holiday,” said Washington, who joined Expedia in June from troubled travel group Thomas Cook.

In a positive sign for rural tourist operators, the firm’s UK boss noted that staycationers were increasingly branching out from the major cities.

Bookings for areas such as the Highlands and the Outer Hebrides are up some 300 per cent this year from a baseline in the low thousands.