Thomson and First Choice add city break favourites to winter programme
Thomson and First Choice have added city breaks to New York, Vegas, Miami, Singapore, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Cape Town to their winter programme.
They are also introducing holidays to the Maldives for winter 2016/17, all bookable from next month.
Meanwhile, in September Dubai and Miami will be available to book for summer 2017 and in October customers will be able to book Nice, Murcia, Corsica and Kalamata.
Back in April Thomson and First Choice had already announced the addition of St Lucia and Cayo Santa Maria to their summer 2017 programme, served direct by Thomson 787 Dreamliner flights from May.
It means that next summer Thomson and First Choice, which are set to rebrand as TUI in the second half of 2017, will grow their long haul programme by almost 20%.
Nick Longman, managing director of TUI UK & Ireland, said: "Long haul remains an important growth area for our business and we want to continue to provide more choice and flexibility to our customers. This is a key focus as we start our journey to move from Thomson to TUI late next year.
"The most searched for terms by customers on the Thomson website are New York, Vegas and the Maldives, and we wanted to seize the opportunity to deliver what customers are demanding."
Next summer the TUI-owned operators are also adding 150,000 extra seats to the Balearics, bringing the total to over a million seats.
In addition, Thomson will be offering four new adults-only Sensimar hotels in Zante, Crete and two in Larnaca in Cyprus. This is in addition to the four Sensimars announced in April, bringing the total number of Sensimars across the world to 51.
Three new Family Life hotels have also been added in Bulgaria, Costa De La Luz and Lanzarote.
First Choice, meanwhile, is expanding its SplashWorld collection next summer with three new hotels opening in Tenerife, Costa Blanca and Larnaca.
It is also introducing three new SuneoClubs in Bulgaria, Lanzarote and Majorca, offering ‘affordable quality, comfy rooms’ and a variety of food and entertainment.
Recent events and the travel advice in Tunisia, Egypt and Turkey had led to TUI and other major operators switching bed capacity and flights to other destinations.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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