Tui: Millions booking for summer sun
BOSSES at TUI are hopeful holidaymakers will flock back to foreign beaches in the summer after coronavirus wiped out winter bookings.
The tour operator said it was expecting the Covid vaccine to give the industry a shot in the arm, with 2.8million bookings already made for later this year.
It follows travel restrictions across Europe during November and December, which saw winter bookings plunge 89 per cent compared with a year ago.
With travellers waiting on the outcome of vaccination programmes, the summer bookings for 2021 are down 44 per cent so far compared with last year. However, daily bookings in January increased 70 per cent over the previous month with the peak period still to come.
Tui chief executive Fritz Joussen said people were ‘sitting on their suitcases and just waiting for what opens first’, adding the UK market had a ‘special significance’ for the German-owned firm. ‘We see an impressive pace and ambitious targets for vaccinations (in the UK) and we should do everything we can to quickly return to basic freedoms and make travel possible again,’ he said.
More than half of bookings were made by UK-based customers, the company said. Greece and Spain were the most popular destinations, with breaks in Morocco also sought after, while bookings for Turkey have been slower.
About half the bookings were made with vouchers issued after holiday cancellations because of Covid-19 last year.