(CNN) -- Planes are expected to be crowded with travelers returning from holiday trips on Sunday and Monday following New Year's.

The Air Transport Association (ATA) expects about 7.1 million travelers to fly between New Year's Day and Monday, January 4. The ATA predicts that 1.9 million people will fly Sunday and another 1.91 million will take to the skies on Monday. That means planes will be filled to about 81 percent of capacity.

Only about 1.62 million people had planned to fly on New Year's Day, the lightest travel day of the holiday weekend. Planes were expected to be about 73 percent full. Another 1.75 million people were expected to fly Saturday, filling about 77 percent of all seats on planes.

The ATA is a trade organization representing major U.S. airlines.

LONDON (Reuters) -- Impressionist Claude Monet has broken the record for the most advance tickets ever sold for an art exhibition in Britain.

Organizers of the Royal Academy exhibition said almost 100,000 people from as far afield as Hawaii and Hong Kong had applied for tickets to the "Monet in the 20th Century" show which opens on January 23.

"This is the highest number of tickets ever pre-booked for an art exhibition in the United Kingdom," a spokesman said.

The exhibition, already seen by 550,000 people at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, groups together 80 paintings from the artist known as the father of Impressionism.

KATHMANDU, Nepal (Reuters) -- Nepal's aim of attracting half a million visitors is not likely to be met this year despite steady growth in arrivals, tourism officials said on Thursday.

The Himalayan kingdom, with eight of the world's 14 mountain peaks taller than 8,000 meters (26,246 feet) in or on its borders, had designated 1998 as "Visit Nepal Year" hoping to woo 500,000 visitors by end-December.

"We will not be able to achieve that figure," said Prachanda Man Shrestha, director general of the Tourism Department.

He said more than 361,000 tourists visited Nepal by air during January-November 1998, up 12 percent from the same period last year.

"If we add visitors who traveled over land plus the arrivals in December, the total was expected to reach about 460,000 or little more than that," Shrestha told Reuters.

He said Nepal needed a 14 percent growth over last year's arrivals to achieve the 1998 target, but estimates showed that the growth could be about six or seven percent.

Nepal earned $116 million from tourism in 1997, about $1.0 million less than in 1996.

Tourism is Nepal's third largest source of hard currency earnings after exports and foreign aid. Southern neighbor, India, with which Nepal shares extensive cultural and economic ties, contributes almost one-third of total international visitors to the kingdom.

Reuters Limited contributed to this report.