The New Year’s Eve nightclub massacre in Istanbul highlighted the continuing terror threat ahead of this month’s inquest into the 2015 murder of 38 holidaymakers in Tunisia.
Thirty of those shot dead on the beach in Sousse in June 2015 were clients of Tui, and both the company’s procedures and the validity of UK Foreign Office advice are likely to come under scrutiny at the hearing due to commence on January 16.
Operators and leisure airlines were operating normally to Tunisia at the time, in line with Foreign Office advice.
But Clive Garner, partner at law firm Irwin Mitchell, which is representing 20 of the families of those killed, said: “There are serious concerns about what was done in the face of what appears to have been an escalating threat of terrorist activity in Tunisia prior to the events in Sousse.”
Tui UK managing director Nick Longman said: “We always rely on the government to make a decision about safety and security. If it says you can’t travel, we don’t travel. If it says you can travel, we do.”
Longman said Tui has placed even greater emphasis on communicating Foreign Office advice to customers since the attack.
“We have always had links to the government website,” he said.
“Since the Tunisia incident we have upweighted that. At every stage of the customer journey now we have references to the website.”
Longman said Tui had also learned lessons from the damaging reaction to Thomas Cook’s handling of a 2015 inquest into the deaths of two children at the Louis Corcyra Beach Hotel in Corfu in 2006.
“We looked at what happened to Thomas Cook and learned from that,” he said. “We changed some of our procedures. We’re treating the inquest very seriously.”
Coroner Nicholas Loraine-Smith has promised a “full, fair and fearless” investigation into the deaths in Sousse.