Irish holidaymakers chase cut-price deals in Britain
Among the best buys is a Peltours package of seven nights in a five star hotel in the luxury resort of Taba Heights on the Red Sea for stg£329 - a package that would normally cost more than stg£700.
One of Britain’s largest independent online tour operators, somewhere2stay.com, will fly you to one of their holiday destinations in Turkey for as little as stg£29, but you had better read the small print on your insurance policy.
Yesterday, Budget Travel dropped Egypt from its holiday programme which, to date, is the only indication of the war in Iraq having an impact on Irish holiday business.
According to Niamh Hayes, Budget Travel marketing manager, the Irish holidaymaker is quite resilient and shows no sign of shying away from destinations like Turkey and Cyprus.
“We cancelled our Egyptian programme because of the number of people seeking transfers to other destinations,” she said.
Bookings for the coming season are well on target as far as other eastern Mediterranean destinations were concerned. Consequently, prices have not been slashed by the Irish tour operators.
But in Britain the picture is radically different. Travel companies there are drastically cutting back on the number of package holidays for sale this summer in response to the slump in bookings.
Cyprus has been reported by some British holiday agents to be down by as much as 50% and holiday bookings to Turkey, despite a massive advertising push, have been shattered.
Holidays to what US President George W Bush termed “an Axis of Evil”, aka North Korea, Iraq, and Iran, are obviously not being recommended.
Travellers are being advised against all non-essential travel to Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Kuwait and Syria.
In a recent British national opinion poll, Turkey, which shares a border with Iraq, came bottom of a list of the countries regarded as safe to visit.
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