{"id":40945,"date":"2019-09-24T11:24:52","date_gmt":"2019-09-24T11:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=40945"},"modified":"2019-09-24T11:24:52","modified_gmt":"2019-09-24T11:24:52","slug":"mideast-tourism-hit-by-collapse-of-british-holiday-firm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=40945","title":{"rendered":"Mideast tourism hit by collapse of British holiday firm"},"content":{"rendered":"<div readability=\"53\">\n<p>\nCAIRO: The collapse of the British travel company Thomas Cook rippled across the MENA region on Monday, with stranded holidaymakers, demands from hotels for payment, and fears for some countries\u2019 tourism industries.<\/p>\n<p>\nThomas Cook\u2019s Egyptian agent Blue Sky said 25,000 reservations in Egypt booked up to April 2020 had been canceled. Blue Sky currently has 1,600 Thomas Cook tourists in Hugharda on the Red Sea, its chairman Hossam El-Shaer said.<\/p>\n<p>\nWorldwide about 600,000 tourists have been stranded by the collapse. The British government launched emergency plans to fly 150,000 of them home.<\/p>\n<p>\nTunisia has set up a crisis center to deal with the fallout, with hotels claiming to be owed $65 million by the company in unpaid bills from July and August. Tunisian officials said the debts would be settled by the UK.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\n\u201cWe currently have about 4,500 British tourists in the hotels who will finish their stay as scheduled, and their repatriation will be paid for by London,\u201d Tourism Minister Rene Trabelsi said.<\/p>\n<p>\nTourism chiefs in Turkey fear they could lose up to 700,000 visitors a year from the collapse, based on the number who had previously come to Turkey with Thomas Cook.<\/p>\n<p>\nHoteliers\u2019 federation chairman Osman Ayik said there were currently about 45,000 tourists in Turkey from the UK and other European countries who had traveled with Thomas Cook.<\/p>\n<p>\n\u201cThere are a large number of small businesses whose fates depend on Thomas Cook, especially in Mugla, Dalaman and Fethiye,\u201d he said, and the company owed up to $35,000 to each of several small hotels.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CAIRO: The collapse of the British travel company Thomas Cook rippled across the MENA region on Monday, with stranded holidaymakers, demands from hotels for payment, and fears for some countries\u2019 tourism industries. Thomas Cook\u2019s Egyptian agent Blue Sky said 25,000 reservations in Egypt booked up to April 2020 had been canceled. Blue Sky currently has&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":40946,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40945","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40945"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40945\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40946"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40945"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40945"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40945"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}