Thomas Cook cancels all British bookings to Tunisia over unrest

Travel operator Thomas Cook has cancelled all British bookings to Tunisia until November following a wave of violent protests across the country.

The Foreign Office advised against all but essential travel to the north African country, which is experiencing its worst social unrest since the 2011 revolution and the tour company said that as a result it had taken the decision “to cancel all bookings to Tunisia up to and including 31 October 2016”.

It added that customers would be contacted individually and said: “We appreciate that this may be frustrating for our customers who have been looking forward to their holiday.”

The Thomas Cook cancellations came as easyJet announced a decline in revenues per seat following the terrorist attacks on Paris and the suspected bombing of a passenger plane over Egypt. The two announcements underline the problems facing sections of the tourism industry as tourists steer clear of destinations hit by political turmoil and terror attacks.

In the latest sign of Tunisia’s economic and social woes, Hundreds of police staged a protest on Monday outside the country’s presidential palace to demand a pay rise.

Reporting on its last three months, the budget airline said its revenues per seat were strong in October but fell sharply – by “high single digit” percentages – in November and December as easyJet cut prices in a bid to attract customers.  The coordinated murder of 130 people in Paris on 13 November accounted for about two percentage points of that fall in revenue per seat. The halting of flights after 224 people were killed in thedowning of a Russian flight from Egypt on 31 October, which Russia claims was caused by a terrorist bomb, caused another 1.5 percentage point fall, EasyJet said. Though revenues per seat improved in January, they were still lower than before the terrorist attacks.

The airline’s shares, down 10% since the Paris attacks, fell 3% to £15.79 and were the biggest losers in the FTSE 100 index.

In response, easyJet has been cutting costs, although pressure on revenues has been offset by falling fuel prices. EasyJet said that if fuel prices remain stable it will save £165m-£180m this year although exchange rate changes would cost around £50m.

The airline said further cost controls would keep it in line for record pre-tax profit of £738m for the year ending in September.

Other incidents last year that caused trouble for travel companies also included the deliberate crashing of a Germanwings passenger plane by its co-pilot and the killing of 38 holidaymakers in Tunisia. Thomas Cook’s chief executive, Peter Fankhauser, said in November the industry faced the greatest turmoil he had seen in the past 30 years.

EasyJet, which is the second-biggest airline in France, said in November that business to and from the country had fallen and that some customers were choosing not to show up for flights.

James Hollins, analyst at Nomura, said: “The French and Egyptian issues have had a more damaging impact on fares than we had expected”, but added that they were likely to by “relatively exceptional and short-term issues”.

The number of passengers carried by asyJet rose 8.1% to 16.1 million in the three months to the end of December, mainly because of increased capacity. The company said it was not planning job cuts to control costs and that its employee numbers were growing.