John Barrington-Carver writes: We don’t usually cover cruise news, but, once in a while, news and stats from other sectors in the travel industry can demonstrate the increasing influence of Air Passenger Duty (APD) on travel trends.
Last week’s figures from the Passenger Shipping Association (PSA) revealed that more than 1.7 million Brits took an ocean cruise last year – 700,000 up on 2010. Similarly, the number of passengers starting their cruise from a UK port also rose by 100,000 in 2011 to 753,000. The PSA said this was due to a rise in air fares which this blog predicted would happen in September 2010.
The top cruise destination remains the Mediterranean which showed a 10 per cent rise in passengers, followed by Northern Europe in second place. However, cruises around the Canary Islands and Madeira attracted 19 per cent more passengers last year than in 2010. Third most popular destination was the Caribbean, but this was down by 13 per cent from 2010, which the PSA again attributed to “a disproportionately high” Air Passenger Duty cost. According to the PSA, if current cruise trends continue, half of British cruise passengers will board their cruise ship in the UK in 2013. That’s a predicted 850,000 cruisers.
Recently, Virgin Atlantic’s boss Steve Ridgeway stated that air passenger numbers in the UK had dropped by 15 per cent year on year, attributing the fall to APD. Also, Amadeus, the aviation global distribution system, published figures which showed that Olympic visitors are using the Eurostar to avoid APD when leaving the UK. Keep in mind that it’s £92 APD on top of the seat cost for an economy fare to long-haul destinations, double for premium cabin seats of all classes, but no APD from rival European airports.
Cheapflights has long urged the Government to reconsider the Caribbean Tourist Organisation’s repeated attempts to have the region placed in a lower APD band. Barbados is just 210 miles over the 4,000 mile band which makes APD more expensive to fly there than APD for flying across America and half-way across the Pacific to Hawaii.
Despite being a record year for Cheapflights Media’s global visits, at an average of 11 million per month, Cheapflights.co.uk viewers’ searches for 23 Caribbean region destinations in 2011 were down an average of 18 per cent. Barbados searches were down by 27 per cent on the previous year which itself was 41 per cent down on 2009.
Grenada had similar drops while Jamaica saw a 28 per cent drop in 2011. With a further 8 per cent rise in APD coming in on 1 April it remains to be seen whether the rise will be counter-productive by encouraging APD avoidance and driving traffic to European airports.
Taxation and high fuel costs are now threatening to push air fares beyond a point where ordinary folks just cannot afford to fly – certainly mid to long-haul routes are becoming so. Last week I used air miles to obtain two premium economy seats to the Caribbean. The sting in the tail was that I had to cough up £812 for taxes, fees and fuel surcharges and then on top of that another £120 to secure seats each way to be certain of sitting next to the spouse!
(Image: nitdoggx)
