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Flight booking data reveals impact of Tunisia terrorist attack

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The full extent of the slump in flight bookings and cancellations to Tunisia after two major terrorist attacks is revealed in new data.

The analysis shows that weekly international bookings fell by 44.7% compared with the same period in 2014 following the museum attack in Tunis on March 18.

Bookings fell by 42.2% after the beach massacre near Sousse on June 26 which killed 38 tourists including 30 British holidaymakers.

The findings come from ForwardKeys, which monitors future travel patterns by analysing 14 million reservation transactions each day.

The attacks prompted a fall in bookings across a range of countries. The biggest reductions were seen from Switzerland, which recorded more cancellations than bookings, mainly for summer holidays.

The Americas is the only resilient region for summer arrivals in Tunisia. Travellers staying 22-plus nights in Tunisia count for over 60% of total arrivals, indicating that these are likely to be people visiting family and friends.

ForwardKeys co-founder and chief executive, Olivier Jager, said: “Our data shows that international bookings to Tunisia have been under-performing since mid-2014.

“Obviously the two terrorist attacks in the first half of 2015 have made the situation considerably worse.”

Major operators cancelled porgrammes to Tunisia for the rest of this year and summer 2016 after the Foreign and Commonwealth Office warned against all but essential travel to Tunisia in the wake of the Sousse attack.

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