(Voices, Reuters and other agencies)
TURKEY’s tourism sector has taken another massive hit today with TUI, the world’s largest tour operator, reporting bookings to Turkey this summer down by 40 percent.
Terror attacks in Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and Paris over recent months have made tourists more wary of those previously popular destinations.
The caution comes at a crucial time of year for holiday firms, because their customers often book their summer holidays in January, February and March.
TUI HQ
The latest bad news follows on the heels of recent cancellations by cruise companies to Turkey in light of the Istanbul bombing.
Yesterday (MON) Antalya reported a massive 81 percent drop in holidaymakers from Russia in January. The shooting down by Turkey of a Russian fighter jet in November has blamed squarely on the drop.
The number of Russian tourists visiting Turkey’s top holiday resort town of Antalya plummeted to 2,427 in January from 12,870 of January 2015 while the total number of tourists visiting the city in January decreased 17 percent, according to official figures.
Numbers also showed that only a total of 97,601 tourists visited Antalya in January, the lowest for January in the last decade.
The gloomy news was compounded by reports that about 1,300 hotels across the Turkish Riviera were now up for sale.
London-listed TUI kept a forecast for underlying earnings to rise by at least 10 percent on a constant currency basis, despite the drop in demand for Turkey.
It said that around 14 percent of its customers had travelled to Turkey last summer, with the destination being especially popular with Germans. But after a suicide bomb killed 10 German tourists in Istanbul in January, demand had slumped.
Chief executive Friedrich Joussen, said: “It is evident there has been a significant shift in demand away from Turkey, with Summer 2016 bookings to that destination currently down around 40 %.
In response, TUI has shifted capacity to Spain and Greece and said its own hotels in Spain, especially the Canary Islands, were benefiting from increased demand for those destinations.
German daily Bild on Sunday cited a survey showing sales at German travel agents were down 13 percent in January. Turkey meanwhile has offered jet fuel subsidies in a bid to stimulate tourism demand after the January attack.