Destinations struggling to attract visitors after terrorist attacks will continue to see a fall in international arrivals, flight reservations suggest.
Turkey will be hardest hit, with bookings for September to December expected to be down by 52% on the same period last year.
Bookings to France are down by nearly 20% over the same period.
Research also suggests Spain, Portugal and Italy are the favored substitute destinations in southern Europe.
The series of terror attacks in France, starting with the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015, triggered a decreasing trend in international arrivals there, which was worsened by the Paris shootings in November 2015, according to travel data company Forward Keys.
France has suffered an accumulated year-on-year decrease of 5.4% between August 2015 and July 2016 and Paris suffered a worse decline, down 7.5% over the same period, BBC News reported.
Bookings to Turkey were down by 15% between August 2015 and July 2016 compared with the same period last year due to a series of terror attacks and July’s attempted coup d’etat.
Olivier Jager, from Forward Keys, said: “Travelers create a situation when they decide to visit alternative destinations.
“Operators and airlines decide to use their aircraft for other routes that allow them to fill their planes.”
Tunisia Recovering
International arrivals into Tunisia fell by 39.4% between August 2014 and July 2015, when a series of terror attacks—including on the beach in Sousse—targeted tourism destinations in the country.
However, figures from the Tunisian Tourist Board show that there has been an increase in the number of visitors from Algeria and Russia.
Between July 2014 and July 2016 the number of Russian tourists visiting Tunisia more than doubled from 63,054 to 131,434. The number of Algerian tourists tripled from 65,000 in 2014 to 194,370 over the same period.
Tunisian hoteliers have slashed their prices to encourage these new tourists to holiday in the country, which seem to have had an impact. Data collated by Forward Keys suggests international arrivals for the coming quarter are up by 13% compared with the same period last year.
