Thomas Cook seeking to expand Cyprus market

One of the UK’s biggest tour operators, which plans to bring in more than 250,000 tourists in 2016, has said that although prospects are good for this year, Cyprus should be doing better.
Uli Sperl, the group commercial director of Thomas Cook, told hoteliers at their annual conference earlier this week that Brits appeared to be flocking more to Spain and Portugal this year as the fallout from a spate of terrorist attacks in the eastern Mediterranean in the latter part of 2015 continued to hang over the region.
“Cyprus is doing well but not as well as you would expect. We are seeing an interest but it’s slowing down,” Sperl said, stressing that tour operators selling Cyprus did not themselves have any concerns. “There is still a proximity issue as Cyprus is close to Turkey,” he said. “Spain and Portugal are considered to be safe havens.”
Sperl advised Cypriot authorities to keep communicating the issue of the island’s safety “on a daily basis” to help overcome the perception.
Thomas Cook plans to bring in around 254,000 tourists this year and 264,000 next year, which if achieved, would be a 19 per cent increase on 2013/14. Some 80 per cent of Thomas Cook’s clients come in through Larnaca and 20 per cent through Paphos. Half of their clientele comes from Britain, 25 per cent from Nordic countries and 25 per cent from central Europe.
Sperl said Cyprus was on the company’s radar as a destination for more business in the future due to its nearly-year-round availability “with a long season from March to November” and significant offers in the shoulder months.
He said the island has a well-established hotel infrastructure with high quality establishments and that there was a joint approach by the authorities in order to establish direct flight connections.
However there were also a number of things that needed to be borne in mind, Sperl said.
One of the main obstacles was seasonality, though a presentation by another speaker at the conference showed that this was not unique to Cyprus.
According to statistics presented by Aris Ikkos, who coordinates and moderates the Research Institute of the Greek Tourism Confederation, Europe has the highest seasonality globally when it comes to tourism. Half of the tourists to the continent arrive in the summer season, while winter visitors tend to either be on business trips or city breaks. “It’s very much a European phenomenon,” Ikkos said. He also said that like Cyprus, mainland Europe’s main attraction for most visitors is sun and sea in terms of numbers and money spent.
Sperl’s additional advice suggested that Cyprus needed to focus on quality. “And I don’t mean four and five star hotels,” he said. He defined quality as the difference between what the customer expected and what he received. “Value for money is the key,” he said. “Keep prices reasonable. You can’t get quality with low, low, low.”
Sperl also said that Thomas Cook was seeking partners among Cypriot hoteliers to engage in its new programme ‘Casa Cook’. Launched in Rhodes, the concept is to provide facilities for lifestyle orientated people with high affinity for art and culture, health consciousness, environmental awareness and who are interested in maintaining a work-life-balance, or as Sperl put it ‘Bohemian chic holidays’.