Simon Tobin Managing Director of the Adventure Division

adventure Adventure was the only division in the Holidaybreak Group significantly affected by the events of September 11th. Both Explore Worldwide and Regal Diving suffered immediate and significant fall-out. Sales recovered strongly as the year progressed to finish a creditable 5% up on 2001 but margins fell at both the gross and net line. Operating profit at £2.4m was 28.5% down on last year’s figure.

The immediate impact of the New York terrorist attacks was that we were forced to immediately cancel a number of Explore‘s tours to countries where the Foreign Office advised against non-essential travel, in a few cases whilst these were actually in progress. New bookings were reduced to a trickle and some customers cancelled holidays to destinations which they felt were at risk but were not on the Foreign Office list.

Our policy was and is to allow penalty-free cancellation of holidays only if Foreign Office advice is against travel to the relevant destination. However, in this unusual situation we did permit customers to postpone holidays or to switch to other tours if they were booked to travel to areas which we designated as ‘sensitive’, broadly all the Muslim countries. In this circumstance customers were asked to bear the costs, if any, of flight cancellations but there was no other penalty. Holidays had to be taken by the end of September 2002. The policy for Regal’s holidays to the Red Sea in Egypt was less flexible as these holidays are in mainstream tourist resort areas and do not involve travel within the country.