Holiday trading by cash-strapped employees escalates

Peter Crush, 12 June 2009

Holiday trading has shot up by 21% in the past year, as cash-starved staff look to boost their salaries.

This is the main finding of Aon Consulting's annual Flex Tracker survey of flexible benefits usage. The survey, which is based on a cross spectrum of companies with between 100 and 10,000 employees, found the proportion of staff selling holiday nearly doubled from 20% in 2008 to 35% in 2009.

"More people are selling holiday in a bid to boost their income," said Gerath Ashley-Jones, head of flexible benefits at Aon Consulting. However, he added: "Buying holiday is still more popular than selling it, demonstrating that ‘leisure time' is priceless to some extent."

The recession has seen a reduction in the take-up of initiatives such as wellness/learning accounts, which have now fallen out of the Top 15 list of benefits. Health screening on an un-funded basis have now fallen to a low of 0.5%. However, there has been a growth in voluntary insurance benefits, including personal accident, critical illness and travel insurances during the year. Fewer people have also changed their level of private health insurance cover.

Take-up of the tax-free mobile phones benefit plummeted to 0.02%.