PHOTO: The Bardo Museum in Tunisia. (Photo via Wikipedia)
Tourism has proven to be amazingly resilient through all the terrorist acts, mass shootings, outbreaks of disease and natural disasters that are reported on the news day in and day out, but there are still examples that remind us that a frightening incident can still decimate the tourist industry in a targeted place.
The TUI Group, the Hanover, Germany-based travel conglomerate that calls itself the largest travel company in the world, is reporting that terrorist attacks in Tunisia and Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, have devastated tourism in those destinations.
The Daily Mail reported that TUI took a $57 million hit from the massacre on a beach in Tunisia last June that took the lives of 33 of its customers. The company canceled its flights to Egypt after the terrorist bombing of a Russian passenger jet in November.
Both destinations are now like "ghost towns" now, according to Peter Long, the chief executive of TUI, as quoted by the Daily Mail. The incident in Tunisia also took a personal toll on Long, who called it "the most tragic event" he had had to deal with in his 30-year career in travel and "something that will live with us, and me, forever."
However there was some relief from the gloom and doom as Long did praise the actions of TUI's employees in their handling of the crises in the wake of the tragedies. And the company's revenues are showing signs of hope yet again as it is revising its earnings projections upwards by 10 percent over previous expectations.
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