Travel review of 2015 and preview of 2016: It was the best of years, it was the worst of years

​Despite all the tragedies that befell travellers in 2015, more of us journeyed to more places more safely than ever, and next year looks even more promising

The best riposte to the men of violence? To travel more than ever (AFP/Getty)

Absent travellers are missed most acutely at Christmas and New Year. For the families and friends of Sally Adey, Elena Bless and Carly Lovett, the final week of 2015 will be intensely painful. It ends a year in which the three were murdered while on holiday by evil men intent on killing as many innocent people as possible.

Sally was among the 23 people who died when Islamist terrorists attacked visitors to the Bardo Museum in Tunis in May.

Elena was aboard Germanwings flight 4U9525, a flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf on which a suicidal pilot, Andreas Lubitz, set the controls for a mountainside in the French Alps – killing 144 passengers and five of his colleagues. It was possibly the worst single act of mass murder of the year – I say “possibly,” because we do not yet know for certain whether the Russian plane that crashed in the Sinai Desert carrying 224 people from Sharm el-Sheikh to St Petersburg was downed deliberately.

Carly was one of 30 British holidaymakers gunned down at their resort in Tunisia by Seifeddine Yacoub – who, in common with other mass murderers this year, found expression for his hatred of liberty, democracy and tolerance in the shape of a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

This has been the worst of years for the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters and sons of those absent holidaymakers, whose lives have been devastated by their loss. It has also been dreadful for the Tunisian and Egyptian families whose livelihoods depend on welcoming visitors. Yet for the fortunate majority of travellers, 2015 has been the best of times.

More people than ever before have taken advantage of the freedom to travel, extending their horizons and sharing their wealth with less well-off communities. The industry of human happiness has kept millions of people employed abroad and in Britain. The more people go on holiday, the greater the gains to the world: tourism boosts work and international understanding.

The best riposte to the men of violence? To travel more than ever. Happily, the optimum place to start is the UK, which has the best travel industry in the world. Having said that, not everything goes as smoothly as we might like ....

Travel review of 2015

The year began with the now-traditional shutdown of the Channel Tunnel. The timing of the fire, mid-January, was not as malign as it might have been. Motorists could easily switch from Eurotunnel to the ferries, which had plenty of capacity, but Eurostar passengers desperate to travel were faced with one-way plane fares between London and Paris rising to £372. And in the summer, the tunnel was hardly out of the headlines.

Easter signalled the start of the also-now- traditional strikes by French air-traffic controllers, grounding around 1,000 flights. Passengers on Air France, easyJet and Ryanair were worst affected, and the stoppage cost the airlines around £10m. Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary helped things along by observing: “They are French so they don't believe in working anyway.”

Thomas Cook was relunctantly in the limelight in April and May with coverage of the firm's shameful treatment of the parents of Bobby and Christi Shepherd – the children who died from carbon monoxide poisoning during a package holiday in Corfu. Past and present executives failed to say sorry until a public outcry led to a full apology to the parents.

Also in May, Butlin's went back to the future, when the octogenarian holiday firm replaced barracks-style chalets with Center Parcs-style bungalows full of retro touches at its Minehead holiday park.

By June, holidays were colliding with a humanitarian crisis as refugees fleeing the war in Syria arrived in their hundreds of thousands off the Greek islands. Add in the interminable euro crisis, centred on Athens, and it took a leap of faith to go to Greece – which proved as warm, welcoming and wonderful as ever. I went twice, encouraged by the strength of sterling.

The once-puny pound also made gains against the Turkish lira, the Canadian dollar – and most dramatically – against South Africa's currency, the rand. But the republic decided to do its best to deter tourism with a new law demanding all under-18s must produce full birth certificates.

Lille is one of my favourite French cities, which was just as well because I stayed there twice as long as intended in the summer, during one of the repeated closures of the Channel Tunnel by what Eurotunnel called “migrant action at Calais”. Travel tangled once again with international geo-politics, with Eurostar passengers and motorists affected as desperate young people tried to find a way through to Britain.

During the busiest summer on record for UK airline passengers, two issues came up repeatedly. With planes flying fuller than ever, overbooking rose – not a problem in itself, so long as it is properly handled. But time and again, British Airways, easyJet and Virgin Atlantic failed to do the right thing by their passengers.

And stores such as Boots and W H Smith were upbraided as a result of The Independent's campaign against VAT in airside shops – the so-called sunscreen scam, with the tax element paid by passengers heading beyond the EU being retained by retailers.

Turkey, already suffering from a series of terrorist atrocities, emulated South Africa in deterring visitors through inexplicably complex red tape. In September, the tourism authorities refused to clarify rules on passport validity, leading to travellers being unfairly offloaded from planes.

From the last day of October, the world looked darker. That was the day that the Metrojet charter flight fell from the sky shortly after take-off from Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh airport. Fears about security led to a ban on UK flights to the Egyptian resort's airport.

Two weeks later, the streets of Paris once again became an arena for wanton killing. But still we travel to the French capital; a reader, Dominic Regan, spent his birthday weekend in December in “a quiet, twitchy Paris, but it was lovely. Shop owners thanked us for being there. I adore the city”.

Travel preview of 2016

The Gulf airlines' campaign for world domination continues apace – best summed up by an aircraft change at Birmingham on 27 March. The world's biggest plane, kitted out to carry the highest number of seats, will shuttle between the West Midlands and the Middle East. It brings to 11 the number of daily Emirates A380 “SuperJumbo” flights from the UK to Dubai.

The A380 has been described as the plane built for a single airport: Heathrow. The aircraft's size helps extract the most value from those most precious of aviation commodities: slots to land at, and take off from, Europe's busiest airport. In the summer, the Government should reveal whether it supports a third runway at Heathrow – or prefers one of the runners-up, either a second runway at Gatwick or an extended northern runway known as Heathrow Hub. Whatever the Government decides, it will be all change at Gatwick in November. When the music stops, British Airways will have gone South, while Virgin Atlantic moves North – joining easyJet, which is consolidating operations in one terminal. What could possibly go wrong?

December was the month when the full timetable of faster electrified services would start on the Great Western Railway. Instead, it looks likely that a fleet of new electric trains will be shunted off to the sidings while the engineering works on Brunel's finest creation over-run still further. But I predict that by the end of 2016, more of us will travel by train – and plane – than ever, as humanity breaks all previous records for mobility.

I certainly intend to help.