ONE MORE THING:JAMES MORRISSEY junior is proving to be a chip off the old block. The son of the veteran PR executive of the same name, handled the publicity behind Thursday's student rally in Dublin over fees, which brought out a crowd of 20,000 students and garnered much media attention.
James junior is one of the backers of a company called The Signature Group, which is described as a creative entertainment and marketing company specialising in youth market events and campaigns on its website.
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EUROPE AIRPOST, which operates charter flights in Ireland for a number of travel groups, held a breakfast briefing in the Shelbourne Hotel on Thursday morning to give an outline of its plans for 2012.
It plans to begin flying from Kerry Airport and Belfast in addition to Dublin, Shannon and Cork and plans to add a handful of new routes to its schedule, including Naples, Keflavik and Corfu.
“Despite the economic uncertainty and the emergence of competition from scheduled airlines, we remain cautiously optimistic towards a rebound of the Irish leisure market,” chief executive Jean-François Dominiak said.
Its charter airline Air Contractors carried 94,000 passengers from Ireland this year.
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STICKING WITHaviation, informed sources tell me that Aer Lingus will shortly announce a number of new short-haul routes to mainland Europe, including Stockholm, Verona and Maastricht, the Dutch city that lent its name to an EU treaty in 1992.
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THESE AREtough times for Irish hoteliers. Latest accounts for Smorgs (Ireland) Ltd, the company behind the Travelodge hotels here, incurred after-tax losses of €2.3 million in the year to the end of March 2011.
A note to the financial statements highlights how a “failure to secure continued financial support” casts a doubt over its ability to continue as a going concern but the accounts were not qualified.
