Today (Thursday, December 13) Tui Group reported underlying ebita (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) for the full-year as having increased by 4.1% to €1.147 billion including foreign exchange translation and by 10.9% to €1.222 billion on a constant currency basis.
However the group’s northern region market – which includes the UK – saw earnings decline to €251.1 million at constant currency rates compared with €345.8 million a year earlier.
That said, only the UK is more than 20% booked for summer 2019, Tui said.
It was a more positive story to Thomas Cook Group’s financials, with the operator issuing a profit warning earlier this month.
“We are focusing on the future,” Tui Group’s chief executive Fritz Joussen said during a media update this morning.
“We are focusing on a digital transformation to become more integrated with things like experiences, and the next wave of innovation will come from digitising our business.
“We will have increasingly individualised offers for each customer. At the same time we are digitising our offer meaning our inventory will be available wherever it makes most sense in the world – all cloud based, machine learning, AI.
“That makes us quite confident that for the year to come we will deliver double-digit growth of 10%.
“Yes we’re up against challenging market conditions, yes we have markets becoming more difficult, yes we have almost all our competitors as well as airlines with profit warnings.
“We seem to be more or less immune against these trends.”
Tui added that owing to its “strategic transformation from a traditional tour operator and trader to a developer, investor and operator of hotel and cruise companies” business delivered “considerably higher margins and is less seasonal”, reducing its dependence on the summer months.
