The Marie Keating Foundation is running a Sunsmart campaign through July 2008 to raise awareness among parents of the importance of sun protection for children as a means of preventing skin cancer in later life. ITAA travel professionals, throughout Ireland will be supporting this campaign - distributing information packs to customers planning sun holidays.
[Edit: Some] Staff working for one of the biggest ground handling companies in the Balearic Islands of Ibiza, Majorca and Minorca are threatening 2 hour strikes on Saturday 28 June, and some other days. Our information is that the stoppages (if they go ahead) will be for only two hours in early afternoon when few if any Irish charter or scheduled flights are due to take off and land.
Of course, most threatened stoppages of this sort never happen as they are called off when fresh negotations between employers and unions start.
Media reports of 24 hour stoppages affecting thousands of Irish holiday makers appear to be wildly inaccurate.
Update (3PM Friday 27 June) It seems that Irish media reports of the threatened disruption greatly overstate the risk of inconvenience to holiday makers. According to the Spanish Tourist Board only a small fraction of ground handling workers will be involved at worst.
It seems no disruption at all is expected in Ibiza airport and those on a handful of affected flights in Palma, Majorca, face the “hardship” of using air conditioned airbridges rather than using the steps and taking a walk across the tarmac as would be normal.
The CSO has published it’s latest travel statistics today. Seems we took 8% more trips abroad in the first 4 months of 2008 than we did in the bumper year of 2007. In fact 14,000 (2.3%) less people travelled in April 08 than April 07 - but this year the Easter break fell in March so the only shock there is that the drop is so small.
Earlier this week a four masted Mexican Tall Ship “Cuauhtémoc” sailed into Dublin Port. I gather its arrival caused quite a stir.
This afternoon the Mexican Ambassador to Ireland, Cecilia Jaber, wil host a workshop on tourism on board the ship covering 7 of Mexico’s most attractive tourism regions. I look forward to learning a great deal about this destination which is increasingly attractive to Irish holidaymakers.
We see in the media today that the Aviation Commission has to spend a lot of money defending itself in legal cases where companies have challenged its determinations. It normally seem’s to win these cases (most of which are against Ryanair) but it still costs a lot of tax payers money. Makes you wonder why the loosing side does not have to pay all of the costs in cases like this.
The ITAA had urged a “yes” vote in last week’s referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.
While the decision of the electorate to vote “no” is unlikely to have any short term repercussions for Irish holidaymakers and business travellers, the longer term outlook is unclear. We will await further developments.