TUI Pins Hopes on Portugal for Now for Summer Holiday Bookings
Photo Credit: Albufeira, in Portugal's Algarve region, will likely see lots of Brits this summer. Unsplash / Dan Gold
Skift Take
Scaling up its tours and activities Musement business with its new online agent partners could help the travel giant recover from repeated blows to its core package holiday business.
Packaged holidays operator TUI’s first-half results hammered home the severity of the pandemic: revenue was $868 million for the six months to March 31, 2021, compared with $8 billion in the same period last year.
But CEO Fritz Joussen is optimistic, with 2.6 million bookings pencilled in for this summer (still 69 percent down on the same period for 2019).
The hope isn’t wholly unfounded, because new bookings grew 256 percent in the past five weeks. But it might end up disappointed in the UK. Three months ago, Joussen said more than half of TUI’s bookings came from the UK, and that the successful vaccine roll-out meant there was “a strong indication that summer bookings will happen.”
[caption id="attachment_428543" align="alignright" width="261"] TUI's bookings to Portugal and Madeira almost tripled after the UK's "green light" announcement on May 7, 2021. Picture: TUI[/caption]
It’s only really Portugal that stand
