Bookings to Spanish islands slump as tourist office pulls funding
~Cosmos managing director Hugh Morgan is warning bookings to Spain could plummet this year due to a lack of advertising. Cosmos managing director Hugh Morgan is warning bookings to Spain could plummet this year due to a lack of advertising.
He said tour operators had been forced to scale back campaigns this year because they had not received the usual financial support from the Spanish National Tourist Office.
Package holiday bookings for the Canaries are already 13% down year on year, Morgan said, but admitted this was partly due to competition from Ryanair, which has taken a slice of the IT market to the islands.
However, he said the tourist office decision not to fund any operator-led advertising this year was bound to have ‘a profound’ affect on bookings.
"Always in the past, Spain has had significant sums to invest in co-marketing campaigns, but this year there is nothing," said Morgan.
The Spanish government’s proposal to raise airport taxes by 15% from July will damage business even further, he warned. Cosmos will absorb the increase for passengers who have already booked, but it will have to pass on the extra tax on to new customers, he said.
"The higher tax, combined with increases in UK air passenger duty, is not going to help Spain," he added.
However, bookings to the Balearic Island and mainland Spain are down only 5% this summer, which is less of a drop than the overall market, which is estimated to be around 8% down on 2011.
Morgan said Cosmos bookings overall were up 7% year-on-year. Despite operators’ fears that Greece would struggle this year, due to its highly publicised political unrest and a lack of tourist board advertising, he said sales were higher than last year. Cosmos has expanded its programme and launched a dedicated Greece brochure.
Dubrovnik in Croatia is also selling "extremely well", he said, with sales seven times higher than last year.
For next winter, Cosmos will launch a holiday programme to Madeira on the back of in-house carrier Monarch Airlines’ new schedule flights to Funchal.
He said the airline would announce several other new winter routes in the next couple of weeks, including flights for the ski market.
However, he said Cosmos had no plans to launch its own ski programme to compete with the likes of Inghams and Neilson. "Their programmes are good, but really I think this is a market for independent travellers so I don’t think we will do ski."
By Linsey McNeill
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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