In TV appearances, Alistair Rowland, Blue Bay Travel chief executive said: “The industry will not survive at all if there are no sales and right now, there are no sales.”

Rowland was speaking during appearances on Jeremy Vine On 5 and Sky News.

“Since the announcement of last weekend, nobody is booking anything in the near term, where in September and October, half the sales were for this winter season, so it’s a very significant change,” he told Kay Burley.

In an appearance on Channel 5, he added: “The industry will run out of cash this winter and this policy will see thousands of particularly travel agencies run out of cash this winter because government has never recognised the support for the travel industry.

“From an Abta perspective we will support what government thinks policy should be, but it can’t be done in isolation of any kind of support.”

He said the testing was a particular issue.

“There’s two things over the last 18 months that consumers really hate, one is the changing red list at no notice, the second is pre-departure testing.

“Cost is one thing, but more importantly, being locked in resort at your own cost – people going away imminently would potentially miss Christmas and kids wouldn’t get back to school for the start of term.”

Rowland also criticised the short notice announcement by the government.

“What it’s done has killed the travel industry; the Grant Shapps’ comment on Thursday night was changed on Saturday. Bookings have gone from a fragile level of recovery – lots of people wanting to travel this winter – to zero, and they’ll be zero until there is some more common sense or continuity on these policies.

“We’ll support pre-departure testing; you could say it’s a good thing it’s an extra test, but frankly, up until Thursday, doing it immediately on your return and then isolating at home until that PCR result is through was good enough.”