Travel companies face hard times ahead of a hoped-for recovery next year, but business leaders see benefits in some firms going under.

Kuoni  UK managing director Nick Hughes told the Travolution Summit in London on Tuesday: “Our industry has pretty low barriers to entry and it does not do our industry any good when, in good times, a lot of players enter the market on low margins.”    Travelsupermarket.com  managing director Graham Donoghue agreed, saying: “Recession is not necessarily bad. Strong organisations will survive.”  

The summit heard a leading economist predict the UK recession would end in the final quarter of this year, but the outlook remains uncertain and consumer spending could be “off the agenda for a while”.   The recession is proving especially painful because it follows an unbroken period of growth in the UK economy from 1992 to t