Travel Industry Predictions 2009

My 3 (UK market) travel industry predictions for 2009

• Ryanair to break another deal with another of their ancillary partners expedia style.
  
• January "peak booking period" to be worst ever by sales (passenger) volume.
• 3 destinations that will do well from UK perspective South Africa (RAND has followed the pound down), Iceland (incredible nature, weaker currency) , Australia (A380 efficiency, "low" oil price)

Seasons Greetings

Happy Christmas Everyone !

Credit Crunch : what would you cut first - Xmas or Hols?

Interesting poll over at the incredibly well visited moneysavingexpert website.

They are asking : Which would you cut first… Christmas or Summer Holiday? 

The average UK family is said to spend £600 on Christmas, and not that much more on a holiday. So in tight times, which would you give up spending money on first?

Note: If you are of a different religion, please substitute your nearest equivalent celebration e.g. Hanukah, Eid, Diwali for Christmas in the answer below. 

So far almost 2500 votes and the results at time of writing are :

A. I’d give up Christmas. 45%
B. I’d give up the (summer) holiday. 41%
C. I don’t do Christmas anyway. 4%
D. I don’t take a holiday anyway. 7%
E. I don’t do either. 3%

Corporate Travel Rant

We have now booked our flights to go to Santander which gave an interesting insight to the in-efficient world of corporate travel in Sweden.
For Therese's flights out, the cheapest way was with easyJet from Copenhagen to Stansted then from Stansted direct to Santander with Ryanair. (yes taking a risk with a "self" connection).

What was interesting was they way she had to book these flights - through a corporate travel agency which handles all the bookings for the company she works for. When I looked at what they had done I could see that :

• They inflated prices by adding on massive booking fees. Who needs commission when you can add 50% as a booking fee ? The Ryanair flight was £66.43 but that was invoiced at 1245SEK (should be about 800SEK).

• They paid £10.59 for travel insurance which was not only unnecessary it would also be invalid for a claim since (clearly stated by Ryanair) Therese is not a UK resident.

• They paid £4 for a credit card charge. If we had been able to book it ourselves I could have used debit card to reduce this.

But what I really found absurd was that on the invoice they had some sort of very high "from price" and a claimed "saving" for using their services. I guess this to keep someone in the procurement department happy, they probably get a monthly report saying how much they have "saved"

So, please remind me to start my own corporate travel agency when I get back to Sweden.

I will leave you with Carol Beer . . . .