UK travel agent closes down for business – but are Malta’s hotels feeling it?

A major UK travel agency closed for business last week, cancelling all future trips, including those to Malta, with immediate notice. 

Balkan Holidays announced its imminent closure on 24th April (last week), announcing that all future holidays are cancelled with immediate effect and that clients can request full refunds for their trips in due time.

The company, which was launched nearly six decades ago, offered UK holidaymakers trips to Bulgaria, Croatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Malta and Northern Cyprus. 

At its peak it served some 130,000 clients a year. However, numbers recently dwindled to some 27,000 a year, according to UK media. 

This closure aligns with recent trends where people are looking towards online bookings systems more than travel agencies to get their holidays sorted. In the UK, there were over 4,200 agency shops in March 2019, but that number fell to just 3,500 by June 2023, a drop of 18 percent  in the last five years.  

The Balkan Holidays website listed several hotels as ‘popular summer resorts’, including Santana, IKYK, Paradise Bay Hotel and Soreda.

BusinessNow.mt reached out to these hotels to see if the travel agency’s closure would make them feel the pinch.

Santana, a hotel in Qawra, said while 60% of their bookings are still made through travel agencies – their occupancy rate is still looking excellent in the upcoming tourist-packed season.

“We’ve seen a huge increase in bookings this year, a lot of tourists are coming in, in summer and also winter. We are currently fully booked until June, and summer is already at 80 per cent occupancy,” a reservation agent at the hotel explained. 

Santana, a four-star hotel, receives tourists from “Portugal all the way to Russia” and also a large number of UK tourists, and ones hailing from Asian countries like South Korea and the Phillipines. 

“In the grand scheme of things, this hasn’t affected it much”.

That being said, online bookings are slowly taking over the more traditional route of using travel agents. 

Last year, news that Europe’s third-largest tour operator, FTI Touristik, filed for insolvency leaving certain hotels with thousands of euro in dues from previous accommodation bills. 

And while the closure of Balkan Holidays is still in early days, the pinch may be coming for those affected by its breakdown, as well as the downfall of other travel agencies.