Tourist group TUI has given tourists hope for a relaxing summer holiday despite chaos at certain airports. "Despite all the challenges due to staff shortages in the industry, the holidays will go smoothly for the vast majority," said the travel group's German head, Stefan Baumert.
According to Baumert, summer travel demand has increased significantly in recent weeks and is "consistently above the 2019 level." "We are catching up quickly and are more than confident that we will see summer business this year that will be close to 2019," Baumert confirmed in the previous expectations. Reservations for the months of September and October have also been rising "strongly" for a few days.
TUI said it cannot realize that people are delaying bookings because of problems with management at airports. There is also no evidence that customers with so-called flexible rates are increasingly using the option to rebook or cancel free of charge up to 15 days before departure. "We are seeing a record number of calls to our customer service lines."
According to Stefan Baumert, the general price increases are not yet fully reflected in TUI's package travel offers, because contracts with hotels and airlines for the summer have already been signed. "Currently, many tour operator trips are cheaper than individual components with airlines or hotels, because there are still tourist packages in the systems whose prices were negotiated last year," explained the manager.
"However, if these quotas are exhausted soon, billing will be based on current daily rates and the increase in fuel and food prices can be clearly felt." Last-minute trips would not be as cheap as before the pandemic. "Higher prices of up to 10 percent in this segment will not be rare," Baumert said.
Baumert hopes to have things running smoothly again at the airports by the end of the summer and the fall holidays. German airports and their ground service providers want to hire thousands of foreign workers directly. The workers will come from Turkey and some Balkan countries, among others, for a limited period of up to three months. To clarify the prerequisites for this, talks are currently taking place within the German government.