When January dawns, my thoughts turn at once to summer holidays - and I suspect tens of thousands of others are also starting at this time to plan ahead for their summer holiday, writes Garret Fitzgerald.
The average Irish person makes 1.4 holiday trips each year, as well as almost as many additional trips for other purposes - the great majority of these being visits to relatives or friends.
Actual holiday trips are divided equally between home and abroad, but international holiday visits have an average duration of 10 days, which is more than twice as long as the average domestic holiday.
In 2002 we spent over €3.5 billion (6 per cent of all personal consumption) on private, i.e. non-business, travel abroad, of which about three-quarters was on holidays and one-quarter on visiting relatives and friends. Actual holiday spending averaged about €900 per person.
Where do we go for holidays? Unfortunately we don't have a detailed breakdown of international destinations as between holidays, visits to relations and friends, and business travel. But if one assumes - not unreasonably, I feel - that the geographical patterns of trips abroad by Irish people for business reasons and to visit relatives and friends are broadly similar to the geographical pattern of such visits to this country, it would seem that today some 75 per cent of Irish holiday-makers go to Continental Europe, perhaps 15 per cent to Britain, and 5 per cent each to North America and to the rest of the world.
This would imply that over 2,100,000 actual holiday visits were made by Irish people to Continental Europe in 2002. Even allowing for a small proportion of people taking more than one such holiday each year, this in turn suggests that one-half of our entire population travel to the Continent annually.
When I joined Aer Lingus in 1947 our only direct link with the Continent was a thrice-weekly flight to Paris by a 21-seat DC3 - which would have brought no more than 2,000 Irish people to the Continent each year. Of course the vast majority of such journeys would then have been by much cheaper surface transport.
But Continental holidays were still exceptional at that time. Even late in the following year when Joan and I combined a business trip of mine to the Netherlands with a visit to Paris to make contact with pre-war friends of mine, the Dutch beaches were still off limits because mines had not yet been cleared; only one street in the whole of central Rotterdam had been rebuilt following the appalling destruction wrought by German bombing eight years earlier; and because there was still no milk in Paris except for babies, we had to learn to drink black tea - a habit that we never subsequently lost.
But to return to our current holiday habits: taking trips both at home and abroad is a practice that peaks in the 40-49 age group, which, of course, includes a high proportion of business travellers. For financial reasons children and teenagers travel abroad only about half as much as people in that middle-age group; indeed teenagers make far fewer trips both at home and abroad than almost any other age group.
And, once people reach the age of 50, they start becoming very much less inclined to travel, while those aged over 70 make two-thirds less international trips than people in their 40s.There are also huge differences between the travel habits of Dubliners and of people from other parts of the country. Dubliners make twice as many trips abroad and spend twice as large a proportion of their income on holidays as do people from outside the region - and they are also more inclined to travel to rural parts of Ireland. The least mobile people are those in the Border areas and the midlands, although inhabitants of the west are equally disinclined to go abroad.
When Irish people travel abroad, where do they visit? Once again, data are available only in respect of the total flow of Irish travellers, with no distinction between business travellers, holiday-makers and people visiting relatives and friends.
But, for what this is worth, two out of five Irish travellers abroad stay in hotels, almost one-quarter with friends or relatives, and one-fifth in rented accommodation. Understandably, perhaps, those who stay in hotels, many of whom must be business travellers, stay only half as long as those, almost all holiday-makers, who go camping, own a holiday home, or who rent accommodation.
Until 1994 spending in Ireland by visitors exceeded the amount that Irish visitors spent when abroad. Since that time we have consistently spent abroad more than visitors have spent here.By 2002 this excess had risen rose to 40 per cent. In that year Irish people abroad spent €4.3 billion, while visitors to Ireland spent little more than €3 billion.
However, until recently this spending disparity was offset by the earnings of Irish airlines and shipping companies - mainly Aer Lingus, Ryanair and Irish Continental Lines - whose receipts in 2001 attained a figure of €1.3 billion. In 2002, however, when the average fare paid for travel to and from Ireland seems to have dropped by as much as one-seventh, the earnings of these Irish carriers fell by over €125 million or almost 10 per cent.
These fare cuts stimulated a 10 per cent rise in the number of Irish people travelling abroad, helping to offset the effects of the recent recession on foreign travel. Combined with the virtual absence of growth in the number of visitors to Ireland in that year despite fare cuts, these factors served to eliminate almost all of our customary annual €700-800 million surplus on tourism and travel.
It is clear that we cannot expect tourism and travel any longer to contribute positively to Ireland's balance of payments. Whilst our tourism recovered slightly last year, nevertheless a further rise in Irish holiday-making abroad may have put us for the first time at least marginally into deficit on our tourism/travel account.
With Irish economic growth likely to exceed that of our neighbours during the second half of this decade, further stimulating holidaying abroad, and with higher Irish price levels discouraging some visitors from coming here, this deficit seems likely to grow in future.