In the first six months of the year, the UK and North American business turned over euro230m, down 9%. The group said that the difficult trading environment in the UK for long-haul remains, but that Kuoni has tried to stimulate the market with new specialist brochures and marketing initiatives. While anticipating a substantial FY improvement over 2004, Kuoni admitted that ‘break-even is not achievable’ for the year. The group said that the Boxing Day tsunami had the largest single impact on the business than any other incident in the past forty years. For the half-year it will lose 40m euro because of the tsunami – 16m euro on cancellations and 24m euro from lost bookings. Overall. Kuoni group returned an EBITA loss of 23m euro. Turnover stayed constant at around 2.5billion euro.