Big spending on airline tickets

Press, 10 September 1984, Page 1

Big spending on airline tickets

By

LES BLOXHAM,

travel editor

New Zealanders spent more than $3.5 million a day on international airline tickets during the last two weeks in July. The post-devaluation rush to beat fare increases produced record business for the country’s 481 travel agents. They issued tickets worth $44 million between July 16 and July This does not include tickets sold direct to the public by airline offices. Their value is unavailable, but an industry source in Auckland estimated on Friday that it would be close to

$5 million. The travel agents’ returns to the Bank Settlement Plan (the airlines’ clearing house for tickets) in Auckland represent a 58 per cent increase on the former twoweek record $29 million, in March, 1981.

Figures for August are not yet available, but they are expected to be well down on the second half of July when many travellers paid months in advance to avoid the 7 per cent increase in fares.

September is also proving to be an unusually quiet month for the travel industry and this is leading to growing speculation that

some would-be travellers are being deterred from going abroad by the New Zealand dollar’s adverse exchange rate. Travel agents last year issued international airline tickets worth $324 million, a fortnightly average of $12.5 million. The total for 1982 was $289 million, an average of $ll million a fortnight Air New Zealand’s share of agency sales is a closely guarded secret, but it is believed to be between 55 per cent and 60 per cent On that basis, the airline would have received a cash flow of about $25 million from the sales boom in July.