Focus on value for money holidays at travel fair

EXHIBITIONS:TOUR OPERATORS at the Holiday World Show, which opened in Dublin yesterday, are upbeat about the prospects for this year despite a difficult 2010.

More than 2,000 travel representatives from 70 countries are at the show, which runs all weekend at the RDS Simmonscourt.

Organisers say the focus this year is on value for money holidays and claim that bargain holidays will be up for grabs throughout the event.

An online survey conducted to coincide with the opening of the show indicates that the recession is not hitting the over-55s holiday market as hard as might be expected.

Some 36 per cent of respondents to the poll said they intended to take two holidays this year, with over 28 per cent planning to take three.

Home holidaying is the most popular choice, with over 60 per cent of those polled saying that they’d stay at home this year. The survey was conducted among more then 1,250 people aged 55 or more.

A spokesman for the show said 2011 would see a slight bounce in the number of charter holidays operating out of Ireland, and he highlighted routes from Cork to Crete and Egypt, Knock to Verona and Dublin to the Turkish resort of Dalaman.

He said that a dramatic decline in the number of package holidays being sold in Ireland – in 2006 one million package holidays were sold in the Republic compared with just 400,000 last year – was attributable to dramatic changes in the way people arranged their holidays, with DIY options becoming increasingly popular.

Figures coming out of the show reveal that Britain continues to be the most popular destination for Irish holidaymakers, and in 2010 1.4 million people travelled to the UK from Ireland. Spain was in second place and 1.25 million Irish people holidayed there while France was in third place with 770,000 people visiting that country from Ireland.

There are, however, enormous challenges facing the sector, the spokesman said, not least a dramatic decline in the numbers using Dublin Airport – last year 18 million people passed through the airport compared with a high of 23.5 million in 2008.