As countries across Europe ease their months-long lockdowns, travel agencies are seeing a surge in the number of flight searches and bookings – leading to optimism about this year's summer holiday season.

Travelers from Germany and Belgium have been driving demand for holidays after the winter lockdown blues for TUI, the world's biggest holiday group, with new bookings doubling since April.

"Now is the time to stop just dreaming about holidays and start planning them instead," said Thomas Cook CEO Alan French, observing the same phenomenon on the British group's platform.

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Now Britons are expected to play their part in boosting the holiday sector, as the UK has finally announced the end of its five-month travel ban as of May 17.

But only a few of the country's traditional top summer holiday destinations in Europe made it onto the UK government's "green list."

While Italy, Spain, France and Greece remain in the "amber list," with self-isolation required upon return to the UK, Portugal is among the handful of countries that made it to the quarantine-free green list, which also includes Israel, New Zealand, Australia and the Faroe Islands.

Skyscanner has reported a 616 percent increase in bookings to the Mediterranean country last week compared with the previous one, when lifting the international travel ban wasn't yet confirmed. 

Thomas Cook and Club Med also reported that bookings from the UK to Portugal through their platforms were already up 250 percent by Friday May 7.

"Bookings at the moment are triple what they were two weeks ago and the majority of those are for Portugal," said a press officer for Thomas Cook. 

"We're seeing high demand for beach holidays in the Algarve and 90 percent of our holidays are for four- and five-star hotels, showing people are really splashing out."

Flight searches for Porto, Lisbon and Faro recorded a month-on-month 500 percent increase in the week of May 10, travel search engine group KAYAK reported.

As a result of the rush in booking, COVID-19-stricken airlines are now adding capacity to existing routes and even launching new ones.

EasyJet, for example, is set to add more flights to Portugal over the summer, increasing passenger capacity to an extra 20,000 seats over the May-October period.

According to KAYAK, Britons spent the last weekend planning their holidays. After the UK government announced its "traffic light" travel system, flight searches went up to about 12 times more than last month, with the Faroe Islands being the most searched destination followed by Portugal.

But gone are those impossibly cheap prices many homebound travelers were keeping an eye on during lockdown. As demand for travel goes higher, so does its cost. 

The price of a holiday to Iceland has soared 43 percent increase compared with a month ago, while the price of going to Portugal has risen nearly 28 percent.

The cost of going to the Faroe Islands is up 4 percent.

Despite spreading optimism among travelers and travel companies alike, aspiring holidaymakers remain cautious about heading abroad amid a pandemic.

Companies report that domestic travel is still expected to exceed international travel, with many looking to book their big trips towards the end of the year rather than during the summer, or booking refundable rates.