The Algarve’s tourism board says it is “already looking for alternatives” to help fill the void left by the collapse of Thomas Cook, although it stresses that the travel firm only accounted for “around 0.2% of passengers at Faro Airport” and did not have the weight that it once had in the region.
“The greatest battle that we face is making sure hotels are compensated for their losses,” Algarve tourism chief João Fernandes told the Resident on Monday.
While Fernandes is well aware that the collapse means that hotels are facing “millions of euros in losses” (click here), he stressed that Thomas Cook “was not the Algarve’s main tour operator”.
“Thomas Cook used to own hotels in the Algarve, but recently it focused only on selling package holidays which included accommodation and flights to the Algarve.
The company accounted for around 10,000 passengers a year, around 0.2% of Faro Airport’s total passenger influx. Thus, we cannot say that the impact will be very significant,” the tourism boss told us.
Nonetheless, Fernandes says that RTA is already working with Faro Airport and other tourism and hotel associations to find solutions and ensure that the people who would normally travel to the Algarve through Thomas Cook will have other means of coming here.
The strategy will be to “intensify negotiations with other tour operators” who can fill the gap left by Thomas Cook and carry out joint marketing campaigns to promote the Algarve and increase the region’s sales.
“We hope that many of Thomas Cook’s current clients can, very soon, find alternatives in other tour companies and airlines,” he said.
Fernandes also revealed that the tourism board is helping the 500 people who were affected by the collapse in the Algarve make it home hassle-free.
“We believe it won’t be a complicated operation, as the Algarve has many airlines that offer direct links to the main airports in the UK, Germany and Netherlands (the main markets that this operator worked with),” he said.
Meantime, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority says that it has already brought back “95% of the people who were originally due back on this day with Thomas Cook; 14,700 people in total.”
