UK Travel Market Still Not Well Or Is It?

There is an unwritten rule in British Travel - that large failures usually go in twos. With the failure of both GoldTrail and Kiss, this should have removed a lot of inventory from the UK market. Not good for the suppliers but better for the Tour Wholesalers.

However there is a more disturbing problem. The UK market is down and its decline is increasing from last year. Unlike most of the other markets in the rest of the world - the UK is having a hard time restoring itself. However this does assume that the markets return in the same form as before.

Actually if you look at the stats they are pretty scary.

Let's look at the last two years (taking mid year 12 month average).
In the 12-month period from July 2008 to June 2009, the number of visits abroad by UK residents, not seasonally adjusted, decreased by 10 per cent when compared with the 12 months to June 2008, from 70.9 to 63.5 million a drop of 7.4%.
In the 12-month period to June 2010, the number of visits abroad by UK residents decreased by 12 per cent when compared with the 12 months to June 2009, from 63.3 to 56.0 million – a drop of 7.3 million.

Now let's look at a comparable statistic - just for scale purposes - lets look at Ryanair. total passengers holding in their stomachs and putting up with all the terrible things that can happen to a customer.

Jul 08 - Jun 09
Total 60.2m

Jun 09 - Jun 10
Total 69.2M

Yes dear readers - you read right. This shows that Ryanair alone now carries more passengers than UK residents who travel abroad. Well while they are not happy about how they travel - the prices are just too good to pass up and away they go to consume that wonderful 50P flights I wrote about earlier.

From this we can show that there is a fundamental shift going on in the market away from the traditional VTO/Charter market. This is not new but the impact of a down economy coupled with the rise of the LCC lift by Ryanair and of course its now many bretheren has been devastating to the traditional players. Time to wake and smell the coffee everyone. Life did change.

Cheers

UK Market Source Traffic Woes

The UK market still shows a decline. It is not rising to the level pre-2008 and there are some companies who are failing.

So far this year we have had 12 ATOL failures (CAA Figures). While not as bad as last year - for the recovery year this is not healthy.


But this is not all. Thomas Cook reported this week that its numbers are way down. The Official HMG stats also show a decline of 9% in the April-June quarter outbound travel.

So guys message to Unite - now is not a good time to strike..

Cheers

UK Cancels Major Airport Expansion

BAA - the Spanish owned company that controls STN and LHR - has canceled the two major projects for the London area which will have a major impact on the future of airline traffic in the UK.

LHR T6 and the 3rd runway was always going to be a battle. In my view the alternative of a new airport would be a better bet. However Stansted cancellation of the 2nd runway is both short sighted and a clear mis-read of the market by the politicians.

Accepting that you will never make all of the people happy all of the time comes down to a decision of what is the optimal solution for the country as a whole. The nature of the UK will be that the infrastructure of ground transportation such as high speed rail between the mainland and the UK will never give the level of support and value than the continued growth of airline traffic. Stansted is a classic case. It is in the middle of the country side and very few people are actually impacted. Whereas LHR is a different proposition. Even Gatwick's second runway is viable - more so that LHR's 3rd runway.

The UK government cannot simply abandon two runways and expect no economic impact.

With no mitigation strategy by the UK coalition government this will have to wait for up to 5 more years before the issue is addressed again.

As we have seen the fragility of the Channel Tunnel continues to blight traffic to and from the Mainland of Europe. The UK needs a balanced mix of international transportation links. Without it the country will be seriously disadvantaged.

I urge the UK Government to re-open the solution for the need of additional runway capacity in the UK.

Cheers

UK Traffic Numbers - Really Not Good

Despite a weak sterling which should have encouraged international inbound traffic... the UK numbers both in and outbound look pretty bad.

The number of visits abroad by UK travelers slumped by 14 per cent or 9.8 million to 60.8 million in the year to September.
Inbound travel to the UK was down by nine per cent or three million to 29.9 million in the same 12 month period.

A 24% drop in business travel to the UK in the year to September contributed to a continuing fall in total arrivals.

http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/ott0809.pdf

Cheers

UK Airspace traffic down 8.9% in September

if you have ever seen those really cool videos from Skies over Britain - you will know that the UK Airspace is one of the most busy skies in the world. Not only from the internally generated traffic but all the cross Atlantic traffic usually touches UK airspace.

Anyway - the traffic despite such things as Open Skies and a significant increase in LCC traffic - total traffic is down 2.1% with a significant drop in transatlantic which is down 8.9% according to the UK privatized Air Traffic Control company NATS.

http://www.nats.co.uk/article/216/257/further_slowdown_in_air_traffic.html

Hmmm... these are real data points folks.

Cheers