The worst of the global travel slump seems to be over, Kuoni Reisen chief executive Mr Hans Lerch told a Swiss newspaper today.
He said Europe's fifth largest travel group was sticking to its 2003 forecasts despite a slack start to the second half.
Business in July "showed that the situation is slowly returning to normal," Mr Lerch said in an interview published in Berner Zeitung.
"It is not going down any more and is even going up a bit, but it is a far cry from the numbers we had in July 2001," he said.
"But the months of July and August support our forecasts for the full year."
The company saw first-half sales fall 17 per cent as business suffered from the Iraq war and the SARS virus outbreak. It forecast last month that full-year sales would decline more than 10 percent and net profit would halve from 26 million Swiss francs (€16.6 million) in 2002.
"The business will certainly not return to the level of 1999 or 2000, but the downward trend seems to be broken," he said, suggesting it would take up to two years for the sector to start showing good growth rates.