The World Travel Awards have examined their navels and decided what are the ten greatest achievements of this decade that they call the noughties. Looking at just the top three,I am not sure that I-or you- would agree with them when they say that number one is the dawn of space tourism. Although it was announced that such a holiday was viable nearly nine years ago, it hasn’t yet happened for other than a handful of multi millionaires. When it becomes affordable, then I think you could say it is an achievement.

Their second choice is social media and sites where holidaymakers and travellers leave their impressions on a website about where they have stayed or travelled to. TripAdvisor is the main player in this. Regardless of what you think of websites like theirs, hotels, guesthouses and B&B’s watch it avidly.

Then comes the growth and importance of no-frills airlines. Their impact can’t really be underestimated and I would have thought they had provided the biggest impact on this last decade. Without them, fewer people would be able to fly, without them some cities would never have experienced a tourism upsurge and without them, prices for seats would probably have been higher. Although it was Southwest Airlines (the US airline that built the revolution in cheap air flights rather than Freddy Laker’s Skytrain) that probably began the successful move to no-frills airlines, it is probably Ryanair in Europe that prompted such an upheaval in air travel over here. And they only launched their first website in 2000.

So what do you think are the travel and tourism triumphs of the first decade?