Taylor on Travel

Are things getting better? This morning's Times says so, with the front page: "Britain on the cusp of economic fightback". The Guardian reports similar under the headline: "New hope that UK pulling out of recession".

The good news is somewhat undermined by a story on page 2 of The Guardian: "City stunned by £13 billion bad debts at Lloyds" - and by a Financial Times back page story on share values in the US: "Banks rise in spite of fading economic confidence".

But no matter - The Guardian spotted a swallow to back up its claims of summer. "The positive trend may be underlined today when the Bank of England announces whether it will continue its policy of pumping billions into the economy. A decision to pause would signal the bank believes the plan has succeeded . . ."

Forward to lunchtime and the BBC reports: "Extra £50 billion pumped into economy". "Bank of England governor Mervyn King had to ask the chancellor's permission to extend the [quantitative easing] programme beyond £150 billion." A Bank of England statement says the pace of economic contraction "has moderated", but the recession "appears to have been deeper than previously thought".

Whoever briefed the papers last night got it wrong - be they in the government or the City - but got the headlines they desired. Pity we cannot believe them.

British Airways' July traffic figures showed a marked improvement on June and, most important, suggest the beginning of a recovery in premium business.

Revenue per passenger kilometre (RPK) actually rose 1% over July 2008, largely due to an improvement in North America, meaning the budget deals on offer have not destroyed BA's underlying profitability - although the carrier has been losing £1 million a day on its operations.

Passenger numbers overall were 1.2% down on a year ago, with premium traffic 11% lower than July 2008 - but that compares to a near 15% premium shortfall year on year in June. And BA flew with more seats full than a year ago.

Willie Walsh will go into talks with Unite union general secretary Tony Woodley over the next few days - in an attempt to fashion a cost-cutting deal with cabin crew and ground staff - in a rather better frame of mind than he might.

Japan Airlines' loss of $1 billion (Yen99 billion) in the three months to May will take some beating even in a season of record airline losses, although Air France-KLM ran it close with a three-month loss to June of Euro612 million ($879 million).

There are particular reasons for the scale of the carrier's losses - most notably the fact the Japanese economy has been in trouble since the early 1990s, stuck in a cycle of stagnation and recession that followed the bursting of a property bubble. Japanese leisure and business traffic has never fully recovered.

Yet Japan remains the second-biggest economy in the world and there are economists who fear the Japanese experience of the past two decades offers a preview of what lies in store for the world economy.

Let's hope they are wrong. In the meantime, Japan Airlines appears in need of the Yen100 billion government bail-out it has been promised.

The Ofcom Communications Market Report makes fascinating reading - though at 334 pages it ought to include something of interest, eh?

News that 15-24 year olds are deserting Facebook and MySpace as the sites are taken over by parents amused me. The proportion with a profile on a social networking site has fallen from 55% to 50% in the past year, while the proportion of adults aged 25-34 has risen from 40% to 46%.

At the same time Facebook and MySpace remain immensely popular with children under 16, apparently. It's a chance to escape your parents' world while in the parental home, I guess.

Blow me, it's those 25-34 year olds behind the explosion in Twitter, too, at least according to The Guardian's report - I haven't got far enough through the damn report yet myself. This fits the recent Morgan Stanley report that concluded Twitter is not for teens (authored by a 15-year-old). My bet is if you removed the marketers from Twitter it would substantially moderate the volume of tweets, but that is another story.

Clearly the internet plays an ever greater role in our lives. However, Ofcom's findings do not entirely fit the "online sweeps all before it" view reflected in the media.

For example, Britons spent an average of 225 minutes a day watching TV last year - longer than in 2003 by one minute. That is nine times the average spent online (25 minutes) and 20 times what we spent on our mobiles (11 minutes).

So we spend vastly more time watching TV than on any and all new media combined. This more than anything is what lies behind the switch to digital TV.

In fact, we still spend more time on landline phones (13 minutes a day) than on mobiles.

No doubt that will switch at some point soon, but other trends may take longer to fulfil new-media fantasies. Most unauthorised music sharing is done by copying CDs not sharing downloaded files, for example. And more than two-thirds of UK visits to YouTube are to watch comedy videos. All that other stuff is largely a waste of time.

Latest figures from air transport association IATA make clear the extent of the downturn in business traffic, but also appear to confirm signs of stabilisation - as suggested by British Airways' most recent traffic statistics.

The headline falls are still enough to trigger a double take, however. Premium traffic was down 21.3% year on year in June, against 23.6% in May, and IATA put the decline in revenue from premium travel at close to 40%.

That is quite a hit when the forward cabin provides anything up to one third of the income of major carriers.

The decline in passengers across all classes was 7.1% in June against 9.2% in May.

Qantas posted a A$181-million (£91 million) profit for the year to June, putting it among the few full-service carriers to remain in the black despite a decline from a A$1.4-billion (£700 million) profit a year ago.

The carrier suggests "there are signs of an improvement in passenger volumes", but offers no view on future performance.

Its estimate of the cost of the initial swine-flu outbreak - A$45 million - is worth noting as it hints at the scale of the impact we can expect if there is a pandemic this autumn.

Industrial action by engineers cost Qantas a further A$130 million, and introducing the Airbus A380 also came at a price - though not one the carrier will be too bothered about that. It has three A380s in service and three more to come by the end of the year.

What will bother Qantas - on top of the downturn and the oil price - are the planned increases in Air Passenger Duty from the UK.

Having cut capacity over the year by less than 2%, there must be more to come from the Australian carrier in cost savings of A$1.5 billion over the next three years.

Kuoni described the impact of financial crisis, recession, exchange rate volatility and swine flu as "dramatic" as it reported first-half losses of CHF51 million (£29 million). But the Zurich-based group still forecasts a profitable end to 2009.

The group's UK business, Kuoni UK, contributed a half-year operating profit of CHF4.8 million (£2.7 million) despite a 23.7% decline in turnover to CHF254 million (£145 million). One third of this was due to the decline in the value of sterling.

The group losses this year contrast with a CHF26.5-million profit for the same period in 2008.

Chief executive Peter Rothwell said: "The global financial and economic crisis will continue to have a negative impact. [But] I am confident the Group will post a positive operating result for 2009 as a whole."

However, he warned a flu pandemic could change the outlook and "have a negative effect on the company's profitability".

Kuoni posted a group operating loss of almost CHF49 million for the six months following a 21% fall in turnover year on year. It reported a reduction of 500 staff, but noted: "Kuoni was unable to fully offset the decline in gross profit despite major cost-cutting efforts."

The group was upbeat about current trading, however, reporting: "The UK market has been recording rising booking numbers for several weeks."

Its UK trading was just 7% down year on year to mid August by value in sterling.

Anyone in any doubt about what really happened in the catastrophe after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005 should read Rebecca Solnit's article in The Guardian today. I'm not talking about the hurricane devastation but the aftermath, when the authorities and the media reported a descent into looting and lawlessness that was pure fiction - lies.

I mention it because I still come across people in the travel industry repeating this rubbish - even some of those selling or representing the US. Obviously they can't have seen Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke. Rebecca Solnit, by the way, is the author of a beautiful book - Savage Dreams - that marries a history of America's National Parks with that of the Los Alamos nuclear test site in New Mexico. I recommend it.

The Guardian offers a bruising rebuttal by journalist Misha Glenny of shadow home-secretary Chris Grayling's claim that Manchester's Moss Side has come to resemble the west Baltimore depicted in The Wire.

What has this to do with travel? Anyone who heard Glenny speak at the Institute of Travel and Tourism conference in Dubai in June will know Grayling never had a chance - gunned down by rapid, overwhelming fire amid the cheap trash of his opinions. You might enjoy it too - Baltimore on Thames? is here.