Spending on both foreign and domestic travel dropped in the second quarter of the year in a further sign that households are locking down their budgets.
The amount spent on foreign travel was almost €1.6 billion in the three-month period, but this was down some 12.3 per cent on the same quarter in 2008.
Expenditure on holidays was down by 14.3 per cent to just under €1.1 billion, while just over 17 per cent less was spent on visiting friends and relatives at €164.8 million.
Business travellers cut their spending on foreign trips by just over 30 per cent to €165.9 million.
The figures are revealed in the Household Travel Survey for the second quarter, published by the Central Statistics Office today.
In all, the number of foreign trips taken by Irish residents fell by 6.5 per cent to 1,927,000, compared to quarter two of 2008. In the first half of 2009, foreign trips were down 8.7 per cent on the previous year to 3,524,000.
The number of domestic trips increased by 9.4 per cent to 2,042,000. The CSO said visits to friends and relatives increased by just over 17 per cent to 649,000. It said to some extent this was at the expense of domestic trips taken for holiday purposes, which fell by 3.5 per cent to 985,000.
Domestic trips for business fell by 4.6 per cent to 145,000.
Overall, domestic trips were up by 2.3 per cent to 3,802,000 for the first six months of 2009. Spending on domestic trips in the second quarter fell by 2.4 per cent to €314.4 million from quarter two of 2008. Holiday spending was down nearly 8 per cent to €197.9 million, while spending on business travel fell by nearly a third to €24.4 million.
Travellers spent almost 20 per cent less, at €33.8 million, on visiting friends and relatives. For the first half of the year, domestic travel was down by 5.9 per cent to €570.7 million, compared to the same period in 2008.
The CSO said it should be noted that when comparing quarter two of this year with the same period in 2008, that Easter fell wholly within the first quarter of 2008, and within the second quarter in 2009.
Each quarter, almost 13,000 households - or about 1 per cent of all private households in the State - are randomly selected from the electoral register to take part in the survey.