Travel agents say the stats lie

TRAVEL DROP-OFF:INTERNATIONAL travel by Irish consumers remained healthy in the first quarter of 2009. Or, it suffered a dramatic decline. The truth is a matter of interpretation.

The CSO reported on Thursday that international travel dropped by 28.1 per cent between the first quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009. But the “Easter factor” in 2008 gave some comfort to the travel industry.

A fair comparison of how the travel industry was doing in the first quarter of this year can only be made by disregarding the first quarter of 2008, when – unusually – the spring peak of Easter holiday travel fell within the first quarter. For a true picture, you need to compare 2009 to 2007, according to Simon Nugent of the Irish Travel Agents association.

There were 1.58 million international trips in the first quarter of 2007, compared with nearly 1.6 million in 2009 – a small difference. In 2008, however, Easter fell in the first quarter of the year and foreign trips rose to 1.8 million, making the decline to 1.58 million in 2009, when Easter fell in the second quarter, a misleading comparison. Also, sports and health travel have been taken out of the general travel statistics for the first time in 2009. When they are included, the number of people travelling for “leisure” in 2009 is the same as in 2007.

Travel agents also sought to downplay the dramatic decline in the use of their services, from 291,000 trips booked in 2007 to 193,000 trips during the same quarter in 2009. Internet booking increased marginally during the same period, from 1,063,000 to 1,194,000.

Nugent said that most of the country’s 160 bonded travel agents also have internet booking and that when responding to the survey, householders may have been vague in distinguishing between shopfront travel agents internet travel agents.

“The trend we are seeing is that for a weekend in London with the brother-in-law, people book flights on the internet, but for sophisticated travel involving greater distances, more bed nights and expense, they are still using travel agents they trust,” he said.