The bosses of three of the largest tour operators do not think destinations affected by extreme weather this summer will suffer a long-term dip in demand.
Speaking at Travel Weekly’s Future of Travel Conference, easyJet holidays chief executive Garry Wilson said he was confident three of the destinations heavily impacted by adverse conditions in recent months would be among the most-booked in 2024.
“I guarantee Majorca, Turkey and Greece will be the most popular destinations next summer; customers’ behaviours aren’t changing in the short term,” he said.
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“The press output after the Rhodes wildfires was interesting: there was this narrative there would be a mass movement of tourists taking their holidays in northern Europe, which is utter nonsense.”
Jet2 chief executive Steve Heapy said people were being “scared into not taking a holiday” as a result of “sensationalised” mainstream media coverage of global weather events.
“Events like this happen all the time, but we live in a world with 24-hour news where things are sensationalised,” he said.
“I’m not a climate [change] denier, but we’ve got to be careful there’s not all this hysteria around events that happen all the time. It’s almost like people are being scared into not taking a holiday.”
Heapy pointed out that 2023 is an El Niño year, which typically leads to an increase in adverse weather.
El Niño is a climate pattern that describes the unusual warming of surface waters in the Pacific Ocean and which typically occurs irregularly at between two to seven-year intervals.
Tui Northern Region managing director Andrew Flintham told attendees there is rarely a sustained dip in demand for destinations affected by unusual weather.
He said: “You see some odd near-term reactions to these events, such as people not booking a certain destination for one year, but demand tends to bounce back really fast.”
He added: “The events we’ve seen this summer are a fairly common occurrence, but what’s felt different is the sequence of random events, and they felt more extreme.”
In a separate panel discussion, Celebrity Cruises EMEA chief executive Giles Hawke echoed these views, saying: “Some of these events are presented as widescale, massive issues in the media, but the reality in a lot of cases is that on the ground they’re not quite as big as what’s being reported, although the earthquake in Turkey clearly was.
“Climate-related events are going to be a feature of the future and we’re going to have to get used to living with them, but they’re not particularly dampening customer demand; people still want to travel.
“What we need to do is make sure we have the infrastructure and resilience to know we can deal with the next event when it happens, and you have to be agile as it unfolds.”