Editorial: Overseas travel patterns return to pre Covid levels

Almost 60% of UK adults plan to take an overseas summer holiday this year.

More than half the population intends to travel abroad more than once.

These are the findings of a survey which also found that many of these would-be travellers will book their trip this coming Saturday, amidst the January blues.

This points to a healthy economy, as do other financial indicators such as house prices, which in the UK have barely fallen from their post Covid highs, and buoyant employment levels.

Meanwhile, the major airports in the UK including Northern Ireland are set to surpass 2019 in passenger numbers, which was the busiest ever.

What, taken together, does this mean?

Well it suggests that the severe economic recession that many experts had anticipated is not yet showing much sign of emerging.

With regard to travel it shows that, at long last, holiday patterns are back to where they were before coronavirus. The idea that lockdown would lead to permanent changes in behaviour has taken another knock.

We are in fact the most privileged generation ever to have lived: no other cohort of previous populations has travelled as extensively, frequently and easily. Only 60 or so years ago there was no such thing as a package holiday in the Mediterranean.

An array of flight destinations are returning to Belfast International and Belfast City airports, giving people more choice in where they can fly to directly from Northern Ireland.

For all the economic challenges, which in the province are particularly pressing given the way in which Stormont MLAs never took any difficult financial decisions, and civil servants (rightly) feel unable to do so either, this society is by some indicators more prosperous than it has ever been.