Families in the UK who are considering going on a summer holiday in Spain or Portugal should book by the end of the month, as hotels are filling up. This is because lots of tourists are looking for ‘certainty’ after recent terrorist attacks affected some destinations. This information has been provided by the airline Ryanair.
The airline has said that holidaymakers from the UK will be ‘fighting’ against those from Germany after people from both countries were killed in Turkey and Tunisia in the last year. The Chief Marketing Officer for Ryanair said that he was recently in Portugal talking to hotel owners who said that a lot of hotels in both the Algarve and Andalusia are already ‘completely sold out’ for the peak months of July and August. With regards to this, he said that his advice to anyone in the UK looking to travel to these areas is that they should book by the end of February. He added that people in the UK have the most ‘constrained’ school holidays, so anyone with children will be ‘fighting’ for beds in hotels.
30 British people were killed by a terrorist on a beach in Sousse, Tunisia last year. Ten Germans also lost their lives in an explosion in Istanbul, Turkey. As a result of these horrific attacks, Ryanair has witnessed a decrease in bookings to North Africa. The Chief Marketing Officer said that this has benefited Portugal and Spain as people wish to go on a sunshine break. He said that people want ‘certainty’ when planning their holiday that there will be sunshine and they will be safe.
Ryanair’s notorious Chief Executive Michael O’Leary said that the airline has ‘an agreement in principle’ with two long haul carriers, Norwegian and TAP Portugal. This relates to providing feeder flights- this means that Ryanair will act as a carrier for the larger airlines in bringing passengers to their hubs for international flights. He said that the priority now was how to deal with handling passengers and managing the booking systems. He added that it would probably be ‘a couple of months’ before there is any announcement in relation to long haul flights.
The warning comes as Ryanair have released their largest ever winter schedule for London. The schedule includes five new routes to the likes of Toulouse, Hamburg and Alicante. There will also be services to Gran Canaria, Sofia and Vilnius during this time.
