Sebastian Ebel, chief executive of TUI, said Spain is running close to its ceiling this summer, describing the country as well booked and often sold out even as the group keeps pushing more travelers into it. The company has been actively rebalancing capacity away from Cyprus and Egypt and into Spain to secure the beds it needs, a shift that only makes sense if Spanish supply, while tight, is still the better option available.
The comments came alongside TUI's third quarter results, which were softer than the year before on the surface: revenue came in around 6 billion dollars, down more than 5 percent, and EBIT fell by 86 million dollars year on year while staying positive. Over the first nine months, revenue was 1.5 percent lower than the prior year and underlying EBIT was 40 million dollars behind it, though the picture improves once one off charges are stripped out.
Ebel reconfirmed full year guidance of between 1.1 and 1.4 billion euros in EBIT, and said he would be very disappointed to land at the low end of that range, a comment his own CFO backed by pointing to a positive booking trajectory as the reason the range has narrowed rather than widened. Turkey is picking up strong late bookings as travelers make holiday decisions closer to departure than they used to, a pattern that is reshaping which destinations absorb demand once the traditionally reliable ones fill up.
The segments underneath the headline numbers pulled in different directions. Cruise had an exceptional quarter, with occupancy and pricing ahead of last year despite the fleet expanding capacity by 12 percent, even after two ships were temporarily disrupted by events in the Middle East. Hotels were softer, weighed down by the same Middle East disruption and weaker demand in Mexico, though rates improved slightly. Markets and Airlines, the segment that actually sells the holidays, posted a 65 million dollar loss against 91 percent occupancy, evidence that filling seats and making money on them are not currently the same problem.
None of this reads as a company retreating from Spain. It reads as one adjusting where it sends people once Spain is full, which is a different problem than the one overtourism protests in Spanish cities usually describe. Ebel's version of the capacity limit is commercial rather than political: there are only so many beds, and TUI would rather move bookings to where beds still exist than turn customers away.