When 14 per cent of your customers fly to Turkey and a smaller but significant proportion go to Tunisia and Egypt, the events of the past year will have taken their toll.
TUI was forced to stop flying to Sharm-el-Sheikh after a Russian airliner came down in October. Holidays in Turkey understandably are less popular, too, given the news headlines, and TUI had to find alternative destinations. It bought €26 million of capacity in the Canaries, although this is at lower margins than the Middle East, while bookings to Spain were up by 10 per cent to 20 per cent.
In the event, then, as many of those Middle East holidays are winter ones, the third-quarter results held up quite well. The skiing side was