Dubai: Demand for travel to Europe is expected to fall this summer due to heightened security concerns. travel agents say.
Forward flight bookings to Europe from the UAE for the summer are down compared to the same period last year, according to some local travel agents. The bombings in the Belgian capital on March 22, which killed 31 people and left over 300 injured, renewed fears of travel to Europe, following the terror attacks in Paris last November.
Premjit Bangara, general manager of Al Sharaf Travel in Dubai said bookings to Europe for the summer holidays have dropped by around 12 per cent compared to last year.
“The publicity generated by these terrorist incidents in Europe has prompted residents in this region to defer bookings to Europe till they perceive that the situation has improved,” he said.
Kulwant Singh, managing director of Lama Tours, agreed that summer bookings to Europe have slowed down, as the “high alert in Europe is affecting a lot of early planners.”
Some holidaymakers are choosing to travel to destinations in Asia instead, he said.
However, Karan Anand, head of relationships at travel company Cox and Kings, said bookings of Europe holiday packages from the UAE for this summer have increased by at least 20 per cent due to “increase in outbound travel from the UAE.”
“Travellers from the UAE are aware of the situation in Brussels and we have not witnessed any cancellations,” he added.
Sharaf Travel has been receiving cancellations of holiday packages — which include flights and hotels — to Belgium since the day after the Brussels bombings, Bangara said.
The attacks in Brussels “could possibly lead to a 10-20 per cent decline in bookings following heightened fears of further attacks in the city,” said Nadejda Popova, travel project manager at consultancy Euromonitor International, by email.
But she does not expect the Brussels bombings to have an impact on the European travel industry in the long-term “as the European travel industry has proven to be very resilient to such external impacts and recover fairly quickly.”
The direct contribution of travel and tourism to Europe’s GDP [gross domestic product] was $779.7 billion (Dh2.86 trillion) [3.4 per cent of total GDP] in 2014, according to the latest report by the World Travel and Tourism Council.
Some travel agents agreed with Popova.
“What we have seen is immediate cancellation; future travel [to Europe] has not been impacted so far,” said Micky Bhatia, general manager at Al Futtaim Travel.
He said the cancellations received are for trips to France and Belgium, adding other European destinations are still in demand.
“There’s an immediate cancellation that we have seen coming in from holiday as well as business travellers due to security reasons but only to destinations that have been impacted, which are France and Belgium. Overall, as far as Europe is concerned, things are as usual. Spain and Germany, for example, are still in demand,” he said.
