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Many UK businesses reported better-than-expected trading last week as they reopened after a three-month lockdown as unofficial measures of economic activity pointed to strong, pent-up consumer demand.

Economists said preliminary data showed the reopening “is also going on [as] could have been hoped, ”confirming their predictions of a strong recovery in the second quarter.

Consumers’ incomes were largely protected by the government’s vacation program during the 2020 production slump, and data collection from store visits, restaurant bookings, and banking transactions showed households were ready to spend money on shops, bars, pubs, outdoor entertainment, and many others Spend stores reopened on April 12th.

In the first three days after reopening, visits to retail and entertainment venues rose to 24 percent of the January 2020 average, down from 50 percent less than the week before. This is based on Google mobility data, which suggests a stronger recovery than after the initial lockdown.

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A similar picture for the retail sector was revealed by statistics from consultancy Springboard, which showed that visitor footfall in all UK retail destinations last week was 25 percent lower than in the same week of 2019. The company found that the gap was in the customer frequency has decreased by more than half in one week from 2019 and reached the level reached after two months of trading after the first lock.

The recovery was due to retail parks, which were only 2 percent lower than in 2019, while visitor numbers in high street stores were still 35 percent lower.

Diane Wehrle, Insights Director at Springboard, said the first week of the reopening was “an outstanding achievement” for the UK retail sector. She predicted that visitor numbers would increase over the next few weeks and the reopening of indoor hospitality on May 17 would give retail destinations “another boost” as many major streets and malls have indoor venues.

Delia Prudence, owner of The Art Room, an art supply store in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, said she expected to be busy reopening “but not as busy”.

“After a year that can only be described as retail hell, we’re feeling a lot more optimistic and confident about the future,” she said.

In the first three days after it reopened, consumer spending rose 10 percent from the same days this week in 2019, after nearly minus 30 percent in the week ended April 11, according to Fable Data, a company that tracks credit card transactions.

In the same three days, retail spending rose 43 percent from the same period last year, according to Fable Data.

Kirsty McDonough, manager of The Crown, a pub on Waltham Abbey, Essex, said while no customers could be served inside, “we were a lot busier than we thought”. Despite the cold, “the atmosphere was fantastic and people seem so delighted to be able to eat and drink again.”

Fable Data’s numbers also showed that outdoor-only pubs and restaurants rebounded to 42 percent below 2019 levels, after falling 70 to 90 percent during the last lockdown. This is similar to the increase in restaurant bookings recorded by Open Table.

More people were out and about in busier shops and other businesses, according to government figures on public transport and car use. With the reopening in April, vacancies recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

High frequency indicators like people mobility or restaurant bookings are increasingly being monitored by economists and policymakers as they provide a more timely, if less comprehensive, measure of activity than official economic data.

Samuel Tombs, UK chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the real-time indicators suggested that the reopening of stores and some consumer services companies over the past week “is going as well as one would have hoped”.

Ruth Gregory, UK senior economist at consultancy Capital Economics, said consumers are “in a position to fuel the recovery as the first signs that households are ready to return to pubs and restaurants”. She predicted that the staggered reopening of the economy would push gross domestic product to about 2-3 percent below pre-pandemic levels by July, after a gap of about 8 percent in February.