Overseas travel to and from Ireland implodes

The trend in May 2009 of overseas travel into and out of Ireland has dropped by 18.4% in May reflecting weaknesses throughout the economy. Irish residents made 610,000 overseas trips in May – a drop of 10% in 12 months.

The following table summarise current trends:

 

(000)’s	Irish trips overseas	Trips to Ireland	from GB	from Europe	from North America	from other places
Jan-May 2008	3,045	2,951	1,547.6	959.6	335.6	109.9
Jan-May 2009	2,729.4	2,667.5	1,320.	927.3	325.3	94.7
Decline	-10.3%	-9.6%	-14.7%	-3.3%	-3.0%	-13%

 

Aer Lingus is suffering a severe downturn in its transatlantic passenger traffic with passenger numbers in the first 6 months of 2009 down by 14.2% from 613,000 last year to 526,000 this year.  This has translated into an even more severe impact on revenue passenger kilometres (RPK) which has dropped by 17.7% in the case of its long-haul business from 3,487,000,000 to 2,871,000,000.

The latest passenger traffic data from Ryanair relates to May 2009 – even though Ryanair promises to publish monthly passenger trafiic data within 5 working days of the end of each month.  Today is Wednesday, 15 July.  The May figures show passenger numbers increasing to an annualised 59,573,427 from 52,464,692 in May 2008.  Ryanair increased in load factor in May 2009 from 80% to 81%.  This compares to an overall load factor at Aer Lingus of 74% for the first six months of 2009, up 1.2% – attributable to its short-haul business.