Tui has cancelled all outbound flights to Rhodes up to and including Friday 28 July, while Ryanair said it was business as usual despite the wildfires that have prompted large-scale evacuations of the Greek island.
Germany-based Tui, which has a large UK business, said it has also cancelled all outbound flights for customers travelling to affected hotels up to and including Sunday 30 July. All customers due to travel on these flights will receive full refunds.
“Passengers due to travel to areas not affected by fires on Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 July will be offered a fee free amend to another holiday or the option to cancel for a full refund,” the travel company said.
“We are still operating empty outbound flights to bring those customers currently on holiday elsewhere in Rhodes home as planned and working to get those in affected areas as soon as possible. The safety and wellbeing of our customers and teams remains our top priority.”
Meanwhile, Ryanair said its flights to Rhodes are operating as normal as it reported its profits had nearly quadrupled in the spring.
The airline reported a rise in profits in the three months to the end of June to €663m (£572m) in marked contrast with the same period in 2022, when profits were €170m because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ryanair said the jump was also down to a strong Easter and the extra bank holiday for King Charles’s coronation.
As demand for air travel soars, thousands of people were evacuated fromRhodesbecause of wildfires fanned by high winds and extreme heat. Between 7,000 and 10,000 British people were thought to be on the island as the wildfires spread, according to the Foreign Office minister Andrew Mitchell.
Some wildfires have also broken out on the island of Corfu, off Greece’s western coast.
Ryanair said it continued to operate flights as usual to Rhodes airport – which is not in an area directly affected by the fires so far. The company operates flights to Rhodes from airports including London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Dublin. Despite the emergency evacuations and wildfires it said: “Ryanair flights to/from Rhodes and Corfu are currently operating as normal and unaffected by the forest fires.”
The company’s Twitter accounts had not posted any information on the situation by Monday morning, instead posting a joke on Sunday night about Elon Musk’s announcement that Twitter will change its name. Ryanair did say on its website that it was accepting temporary travel documentation issued by the Greek police for travellers who had lost their passports during the scramble to avoid wildfires.
The consumer group Which? on Sunday said it would be “unconscionable for holiday companies to cash in on travellers’ sensible decision not to travel by not refunding or rebooking them” if they decided not to travel to Rhodes. Some airlines have said they will allow passengers to rebook.
The Jet2 airline said it would run four extra flights on Monday to bring customers back to the UK. The repatriation flights to Manchester, Leeds Bradford and Birmingham would bring home about 800 people. The airline, which said it was expecting its highest ever passenger numbers over the weekend, was already scheduled to operate 50 services from Rhodes to the UK this week.
Tui said six additional planes had flown customers back to Hanover, Frankfurt and Stuttgart in Germany and to London Gatwick, Birmingham and Manchester; another will fly to Billund in Denmark. The company said that it had about 39,000 guests on Rhodes on Sunday, of whom 7,800 were moved to other locations on the island.
EasyJet said it would operate two repatriation flights on Monday from Rhodes to London Gatwick, in addition to scheduled flights, plus a third repatriation flight on Tuesday. Tui said on Sunday evening that all passengers due to travel to Rhodes, up to and including on Tuesday, would receive full refunds.
Ryanair is operating its largest ever summer schedule, carrying as many as 600,000 passengers on 3,200 flights a day. The company said that “European short-haul capacity remains constrained this summer” and that demand for the first half of the year is “robust”.
However, its chief executive, Michael O’Leary, said Ryanair would probably have to cut prices to attract passengers this winter, when it will have 25% more seats to fill than in 2019. At the same time, rising interest rates are gradually affecting more people, raising the costs for some mortgage borrowing and reducing disposable incomes.
“We’re concerned about the impact of these macroeconomic trends,” O’Leary said in an analyst presentation on Monday. “Consumer price inflation, higher interest rates, higher mortgage rates might affect consumer spending in the second half of the year.”
Ryanair shares were down by 6% on Monday, while the British Airways owner IAG dipped by 2%, easyJet was down by 4% and Tui fell by 3.5%.
