5 minute read
Window seat
Last month in numbers
u 55bn Projected losses to the aviation industry from Coronavirus, according to IATA.
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u 5.26bn Revenue generated by tourism in Ireland in 2019.
152.4m Number of passengers carried by Ryanair in 2019, a record.
11.6m Number of passengers carried by Aer Lingus in 2019, also a record.
10.5m Number of passengers carried by Ryanair in February 2020, a record. for the month
11.1m Visitors to Ireland, 2019, 96 Ryanair load factor for the year, $15.50 New compulsory daily gratuity charge on board Celebrity cruises.
WHERE THE ROCKS COLLIDE
Seth Linder’s Causeway Coast serves as a useful handbook for anyone exploring the Belfast to Derry coast and hinterland. Travelling by land along the route is a recent innovation. Setters say that hopping the twenty miles to Scotland was part of the local culture, and people were more inclined to offer “a sail than a lift.”
Gnarled castles, basalt and limestone landscapes, fossils and follies mark the route. The Londoner navigates through legends, heroic and romantic Irish literary allegories, Game of Thrones scenes dated by season and modern tourist infrastructure.
Even the rocks collided forcefully here to give the coast its distinctive tone and colour. It is a tapestry of shared culture, native and settler, chieftain and gallowglass, the Irish and Gaelic languages (probably not conversant In either, Linder confuses them occasionally), Ulster Scots and low English, colonised and colonist, and the overlay of George RR Martin’s invented legend Theon Greyjoy and Randall MacDonnell.
There is much to learn even for those familiar with the route, Hugh Boyd built Ireland’s first railway on Fair Head, the walls of Carrickfergus are older than those at Derry, the Bushmills Inn was once used as a bicycle factory, and, at the end, an endearing homage to Angelo Morelli’s ice cream in Portstewart. Delicious. The Causeway Coast by Seth Linders O’Brien Press
Busman’s holiday: Bernie Burke
Every month we ask a leading travel professional to write about their personal holiday experience. This month: Bernie Burke of Travel centres W hen I think about holidays the first thing that automatically comes to mind is …the sea. I seem to have a deep seated psychological connection that I can only put down to the fact that I was brought up living in London with no chance of gazing at the sea. August every year my parents, bothers and sister would make the pilgrimage ‘home’ to Waterford. My distinct memory was of the train to Fishguard in the dark, and the journey across the Irish Sea – it was thrilling!
I now find myself living with a permanent sea view and look out at the horizon every day, there is something quite calming about it – one of the precious things that I cannot live without. So there is no surprise when I say that my holiday of choice is Cruising – big ship, small ship, new ship, older ship – I really don’t mind, for me its all about a couple of things. Firstly, the destination is where I start my search. A couple of years ago we picked up a repositioning Celebrity ship travelling from Sydney to Hawaii, how else was I going to visit Fiji, Bora Bora and Tahiti. Yes it was as exotic as it sounds. One of my other favourites was cruising from Singapore, I highly recommend a couple of days in Singapore before sailing around Vietnam, Hong Kong and Kota Kinabalu.
Secondly, Cruising for me is also about the food, the service, people you meet on board. I also love the fact that I can unpack for a week or more and effortlessly cover four or five fantastic destinations in one holiday.
On dry land it’s hard to pick a favourite destination or best holiday – impossible to say but in no particular order I
Tenerife: Bernie Burke’s secret p[pilgrimage destination
loved the Seychelles for so many reasons, the beaches, the food, the people, its so easy to travel around, did I mention the beaches!
South Africa, I loved it for much the same reasons as the Seychelles but with wild animals. Everyone needs to do at least one safari before they die.
Being a food and wine lover (that’s another reason I cruise) I fell completely and totally in love with Puglia, Italy – it’s a little bit ‘the land that time forgot’ washed down with lots of red wine and organic seasonal food.
I have a made a pilgrimage of my own every year for some time now, not to Fishguard on the train but to Tenerife. We set aside one week each year and go back again and again – it’s beautiful, and yes, it’s quiet, no crowds – I’m not willing to share anymore detail as I would like it to remain that way.
I am now more than a little half way through my life and can confirm that my bucket list is far longer than the stamps in my passport. So hopefully in the near future I will see South America, The Galapagos Islands, Whitsunday Islands, Turks and Caicos and so the list goes on, and on, and on.
FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
Tourists and business travellers may think that staying away from affected places is entirely rational during a pandemic. They are wrong.
The World Bank estimates that 90pc of economic losses during any outbreak arise from “irrational” efforts of the public to avoid infection in ways that do no such thing. Tiffany Misrahi of the Madrid based World Travel & Tourism Council notes that Ebola had a
catastrophic impact on African tourism, whether or not a country was host to Ebola infections or not. Tanzania,a country over 3,000 miles from the Ebola outbreak, never had a single case of the disease, yet saw hotel bookings fall by up to 50pc in October 2014.
SARS in 2003 had consequences far beyond Asia. A drop in air travel in North America caused by the outbreak caused a wave of bankruptcies and consolidation among airlines based there.
The travel industry has seen major disruption as governments impose travel bans on Chinese visitors to stop the spread of Coronavirus.
Passenger air traffic after the start of an outbreak normally goes back to pre-pandemic levels after 7 to 9 months. With SARS the trough was deeper
How deep this trough will be, only time will tell.
IN YOUR NEXT TRAVEL EXTRA: Available to Travel Agents or online April 1 2020
