Most airlines are reporting a deterioration in profitability in the fourth quarter – a trend expected to continue in the year ahead. Ryanair have bucked the trend reporting a profit in Q4 2011. IATA’s most recent survey of airlines shows a particularly sharp decline in expectations for passenger and cargo traffic growth, with passenger yields expected to do little better than stabilize over the next 12 months. Breakeven load factors remain high as a result. Profit and traffic confidence expectations have now fallen to levels seen at the start of 2009, a period when the industry was generating losses and travel volumes had weakened sharply.

The number of visits abroad by UK residents remained static in the 12 months to the end of November last year at 55.7 million. Broken down by region, visits to Europe increased 1% to 43.3 million, visits to North America rose 1% to 3.6 million, while visits to other parts of the world dropped 6% to 8.8 million.

Holiday visits fell 1% to 36.2 million, business visits fell 1% to 6.7 million while visits to friends or relatives increased 4% to 11.3 million. Visits for miscellaneous reasons dropped 12% to 1.5 million.

But while visits remained static, expenditure on overseas visits fell by 3% to £30.9 billion.

Against that background the estimated 5% growth in visitors to Ireland for 2011 is encouraging, though most of that growth occurred in the earlier part of the year.

DAA welcomes Emirates’ 52% capacity expansion just 3 weeks after Dublin-Dubai route launch

Emirates will increase the number of available seats on its recently launched Dublin-Dubai route by 52% from July when it introduces a larger Boeing 777-300ER aircraft on the service. The larger aircraft (360 seats) will replace the A330-200 (237 seats) currently on the route as the airline withdraws the type from service.

Flybe to launch daily Birmingham to Waterford service and three flights per week from Leeds Bradford to Knock from end March 2012. The Birmingham-Waterford route was previously operated by Aer Arann, while Ryanair operated a Leeds Bradford-Knock service in the past.

Ryanair will operate new services from Girona to Cork and from Budapest to Dublin for summer 2012.

Adria Airways, the financially troubled airline, is cancelling plans to operate their seasonal weekly Ljubljana-Dublin scheduled service in summer 2012.

A list of predictions for travel and tourism for 2012 from JWT, a marketing communications company, include:

• Apps which allow travellers to comparison-shop and then book limo services, while Postcard on the Run allow tourists to turn snapshots into snail-mailed postcards with personalised greetings and several new apps provide near real time translations.
  
• A crop of new personalised services for travellers, many based on consumers’ social media profiles. Forward-thinking hotels and airlines are using technology combined with customer phones, to smooth and speed up the experience. Qantas frequent flyers now get a RFID-enabled card that functions as a boarding pass, while Starwood Hotels are introducing loyalty cards that double as room keys.
  
• Titanic related anniversary events and Myanmar are the top hot destinations.
  
• Hotels from Vancouver and Copenhagen to Singapore and London are reviving women-only floors.
  
• Campinmygarden.com lets people rent their back yards to tourists.

Europe’s online travel market is thriving with online travel agencies (OTAs) estimated to have grown by 19% in 2011 to reach €33.4 billion, according to PhoCusWright’s European Online Travel Overview Seventh Edition. By comparison, supplier website bookings are estimated to have grown just 9%, giving OTAs a substantial edge.

The strains of the euro area’s sovereign-debt crisis continue to threaten the global economy. The IMF sharply cut its forecast for global economic growth, saying debt crisis woes in the eurozone posed a threat to global recovery.

Eurozone business leaders and consumers are slightly more optimistic than a month ago, with the European Commission reporting that economic sentiment crept up to 93.4, as measured by its own business climate survey, up from 92.8 in December. Consumer pessimism has moved from -21.3 in December to -20.7 in January. Economic sentiment slid to a two-year low in December. January was a month in which shares have risen and most peripheral bond yields have fallen. However, that mood could quickly darken if Greece's debt/bailout talks fail.

Germany's GDP grew by 3% last year, according to a first estimate. But the economy may have contracted slightly in the fourth quarter.

The governor of the Bank of England, Sir Mervyn King, said that the UK faces an arduous path to economic recovery. Meanwhile the International Monetary Fund cut the growth forecast for the UK economy in 2012 to 0.6% from 1.6%.

The US economy grew at the fastest pace in a year and a half in the fourth quarter of 2011, with GDP rising at an annual rate of 2.8%, a considerable increase from 1.8% in the third quarter. The unemployment rate in America fell again, to 8.5% in December. Last year American employers created 1.6m jobs, the most since 2006 but a long way short of the 8.7m that were lost during the recession and after. However, these positive indicators have failed to dispel uncertainties about the economic outlook. The Fed marked down its forecasts for the US economic growth both for 2012 and 2013 in its latest quarterly estimate and pledged to keep interest rates low until late 2014.