Recent news that Ryanair plans to hike fares by an average of 12% could be a harbinger that the era of cheap global travel is drawing to a close.

Coinciding with the arrival from Iceland of another disruptive ash cloud, it’s the latest in a series of blows to air travellers who for years enjoyed falling air fares and a proliferation of routes to exotic locations.

The controversial no-frills carrier already hiked its prices 12% last financial in response to surging oil prices.

And with remote-working technologies like video conferencing evolving rapidly and Skype video calls costing a negligible amount if anything at all, I foresee a long-term decline in business-related travel.

The great democratisation of air travel, which enabled even those on low incomes to visit far-flung places, could now be going into reverse. If that sounds hyperbolic then find me a commentator who believes oil prices are on anything other than a long-term trajectory.

With fuel accounting for 20-30% of operational costs the airline industry is particularly susceptible to fluctuations in oil prices. A number of airlines have already increased surcharges to offset higher fuel costs.

Ryanair is also planning to ground twice as many aircraft this winter despite posting a 23% increase in net profit last financial year.

I can envisage a growing reticence among businesses to fund foreign trips, even if meeting face to face is the ideal way to build relationships with clients and suppliers. Expect companies to increasingly eschew non-essential overseas travel in favour of Skype calls and video conferencing.

Arguably, businesses will even scale back domestic business trips. Car travel isn’t getting any cheaper, while rail fares, already the most expensive in Europe, are set to rise above inflation for years to come.

The painful process of deleveraging national and personal debt is far from over and we’re faced with years of anaemic growth, so many businesses will retain an extremely frugal mindset. As transport costs soar, business travel, I believe, will be ripe for cutbacks.

While this can only spell good news for manufacturers of remote-working technologies, it’s not so encouraging for those B&Bs or hotels that receive a lot of business-related guests. Anyone scouring gas stations for sale can rest easy of course – petrol being a non-discretionary commodity for the vast majority of purchasers.

There are huge implications for tourism. ‘Staycation’ seems like one of those words that emerged from nowhere, suddenly seemed ubiquitous, but will soon vanish from our lexicon. But whether the word persists, the trend towards people taking holidays in their own country won’t be arrested just because we’ve emerged from recession. 

Back in the 80s domestic holidays almost came to be seen as something you settled for if you were poor. By the noughties, fuelled by the rise of the no-frills airline, all social classes could afford a trip to Sharm El Sheikh and the foreign holiday became passé. Now the middle classes are reclaiming the domestic holiday and hiring a cottage in Cornwall is no longer naff and more economical than a trip to Tenerife.

Rising fuel prices and stagnant economic growth suggests a gradual fall in international tourists will be offset by a steady rise in indigenous tourists. Tourists from China and India, accounting together for a third of the world’s population and still enjoying double digit growth, are inevitably going to plug the gap too, which assuages the tourist trade’s concerns considerably.

Sometimes trends endure for so long that, in defiance of all logic, they begin to seem like ineluctable truths. Just as the longest period of continuous growth since the World Wars caused one Gordon Brown to apparently believe with all sincerity that he’d vanquished recessions, many of us complacently believed (or rather instinctively felt) that relentless technological progress meant cheap flights were a fixture. 

But I think the genuinely epoch-making advances we’ve witnessed in computer and internet technology have blinded us to glacial progress in other areas. Don’t believe me? Then consider that in the late 1970s you could fly from London to New York in just three hours and thirty minutes – that journey, more than three decades hence, now takes at least 7-8 hours.

It seems like we’ve hit a kind of ceiling, which makes the aviation industry’s attempts to offset rising fuel costs with improvements in engine efficiency appear rather forlorn.