The president of the Irish Tour Operators Federation, Kevin Nolan, got in touch in response to last week’s piece “Package versus personal: wholl win out in the end?”, in which Sandra O’Connell looked at the pros and cons of booking a package holiday
“Whilst I acknowledge that it supported the package holiday, it didn’t go far enough in driving home the message. One particular issue the public are beginning to become aware of is that seats from so-called low-cost carriers are no longer low cost.
The two main reasons behind this are a reduction in capacity (partly through the sale of significant blocks of seats to tour operators) and the need to earn more realistic revenue per seat.
It is clear that Aer Lingus couldn’t continue to subsidise the public’s travel costs. Over the last two years it has been burning hundreds of millions of euro selling cheap seats.
Tour operators are the original low-cost suppliers, and will always be in a position to offer value-for-money holidays.
- After we printed Margaret Richardson’s account of a problem with booking a room at the Barceló Edinburgh Carlton Hotel, in our February 27th issue, Barceló UK asked us to point out that human error at the hotel was to blame and that Booking.com and its online reservation system was in no way responsible for the confusion that arose.
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