One week after the UK Brexit vote, American travelers are taking advantage of favourable exchange rates and looking to go transatlantic, with flight searches up 59%.
Great Britain is now the most-searched destination outside of domestic US flights, according to travel search site Hipmunk.
Hipmunk’s most-searched destination table shows Great Britain jumping up two places and knocking Mexico and Canada into third and fourth position.
By comparison, on every other day in the month of June the UK claimed the number four position.
Hipmunk says daily flight searches from the US to the UK as a share of total US-departing flight searches are up 59% when comparing the first 23 days of June 2016 to searches made on or after June 24, 2016, when the results of the EU referendum were announced.
Hipmunk said: "While the UK reels in the wake of the fallout from Brexit, American travelers seem eager to take advantage of the depreciating pound and say ‘how do’ to Great Britain.
To ensure that the increases weren’t a seasonal variation, Hipmunk looked at the comparable time frames in June 2015 and found that a 59% increase as a share of total searches departing from the US is far beyond the expected seasonal variation.
London saw a 31% increase in average daily flight searches since Brexit, with Edinburgh and Manchester both seeing a 22% increase.
Hipmunk analyzed daily flight searches on its site for flights departing the US and arriving in the UK in the month of June both pre-Brexit (June 1-23, 2016) and post-Brexit (June 24-28, 2016), and compared those numbers to historical June data (June 3, 2015 – June 30, 2015).
