Trips are postponed
The Mediterranean gets too hot for the Swiss
A new study shows that the travel behavior of the Swiss is changing in summer. Because it’s getting hotter and hotter, they prefer to travel to the classic Mediterranean destinations in autumn.
The Swiss love holidays on the Mediterranean. It is the number 1 travel destination for most Swiss people. Also in the summer. But now it is apparently getting too hot for them in the Mediterranean! Tourists are slowly but surely moving to cooler areas. This is shown by figures that the Swiss tour operator Kuoni evaluated at the request of “NZZ am Sonntag”.
Kuoni compared the months of July and October, i.e. an effective summer and autumn holiday month. The result: in 2009 Mallorca, Crete and Cyprus were still clear summer destinations. Since then there has been a shift to autumn. Kuoni now sends more customers to Cyprus in October than in July.
“A consequence of climate change”
“If popular tourist destinations are visited more and more in the off-season, this is a consequence of climate change,” says Markus Flick, Kuoni media spokesman in the “NZZ am Sonntag”.
The big trump card of the Mediterranean is its weather security. The sun shines practically continuously for months. A fact that tourists from all over the world envy for countries like Italy, Spain or Greece. However, the fact that it is now getting hotter could have negative consequences.
From 37 it’s too hot
A study by McKinsey, which is available to “NZZ am Sonntag”, warns of the consequences of the heat. For McKinsey, the threshold between hot and unbearably hot is 37 degrees. Then the tourists would stay away and look for a new travel destination.
In concrete terms: by 2050, in the Turkish city of Antalya, for example, the “unbearable” days are to double from the current 30 to 60 a year. In southern Spain or Egypt, too, hot days with over 37 degrees are expected to increase by over 50 percent. Gloomy prospects for countries that live to a large extent on income from tourism. (pbe)