Unbearable heat, fainting in queues for popular attractions, forest fires, and other calamities led to the mass outflow of tourists from the most popular region – the Mediterranean countries – Spain, Italy, Greece, etc. “I will not set foot in the Mediterranean anymore, I will find rest in my region, where I will not suffer from the heat so much!” – write on social networks “affected” tourists who received an “extreme” vacation. Hotels and local travel agencies can only shed bitter tears.
According to the European Tourist Commission (ETC), the number of tourists planning to visit the Mediterranean region between June and November has already fallen by 10% compared to last year. At the same time, we will remind you that last year the plans of tourists were already ruined – heat and forest fires also joined the flight chaos. “We expect that unpredictable weather conditions in the future will affect the choice of travelers in Europe,” commented Miguel Sanz, head of ETC, on the statistics. According to his estimates, although 7.6% of travelers currently consider extreme weather events a serious problem, future tourist flows may shift to “cooler” places – such as Ireland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Bulgaria.
The opinions of ordinary tourists confirm this assessment. For example, as Norwegian tourists write, Anita Elshoy and her husband, who was going to rest in Vasanello, a village north of Rome, ran away from their vacation a week earlier — when the temperature reached only +36 degrees. “I had a severe headache, my legs and fingers were swollen, and I was getting more and more dizzy in my head. We were supposed to be there for two weeks but couldn’t stay because of the heat,” the tourist writes. At the same time, let us remind you that only new records of unrelenting heat are promised this week – up to 48 degrees Celsius and higher. “The heat wave is unprecedented,” complains Italy. In Greece, tourists who lost consciousness had to be taken down from the Acropolis, where an “ambulance” is not provided, after which the attraction began to be closed for a siesta.
“We will think twice before booking a trip to Rome again in July as we tried our best to drink enough water, stay cool and find air-conditioned places to rest. Only when it will be cooler – at least September, at least April,” American tourists say. And this is “bad news for the Italian economy”, experts assure – hotels and travel agencies with such a high season can only shed tears and fear that they did not have time to recover from covid when the threat of destruction attacked them from the other side. Italy’s environment ministry has at least officially warned in a report this year that foreign tourists will travel more in the spring and autumn and choose cooler destinations in the future.
However, some hotels are threatened with purely physical disappearance – the threat of forest fires has not gone anywhere, under attack – the greenest resort places from Greece and Turkey to Switzerland, as the press assures – evacuated hundreds and even thousands of tourists. In the canton of Valais, Switzerland, more than 200 firefighters worked tirelessly through the night to put out the flames of a roaring forest fire, but flames engulfed villas in several popular mountain villages. In Greece, forests are burning north of Athens, less than 20 kilometers from the tourist center of Athens, and the coast, which is heavily built up with hotels, is burning.
At the same time, forecasters do not reassure tourists or the tourism industry – the heat will last at least until August, they assure. Italy will set records, +42 degrees are expected in Greece and Cyprus, 20 cities across Italy, including Rome, are included in the “red zone”, where the temperature will rise to a record 43°C (read details here). As a result, tourists continue to cancel reservations. By the way, the hellish heat reigns on the beaches of Antalya, which are popular with our tourists, and drives tourists off the beaches – details here.