Heatwaves: Will Winter Be The New European Summer?

With rising temperatures and frequent heatwaves, tourism industry and tourists, especially in Europe, ought to begin preparing for a dramatic shift from summer travel to winter. Destinations should start preparing their industry for the coming upheaval.

- Ranvir Nayar

In August, Sebastian Ebel, the Chief Executive Officer of Tui, a large travel agency, said that his company had incurred an expense of EUR 25 million in evacuating 8,000 of its customers from the Greek island of Rhodes that suffered one of its worst wildfires in the peak travel season, affecting tens of thousands of tourists from all across the world, notably Europe.

Over the past few years, extreme weather events, especially flash floods, cyclones as well as heatwaves and forest fires have increasingly impacted tourists, who have had to cut short their vacations or at least be evacuated. However, this is the first time that a company, that too a tour operator, has actually put a value to the cost incurred in such an evacuation.

And with each passing summer, these incidents seem to be becoming ever more frequent and more dangerous. In August, for instance, hundreds of vacationers in resort island of Maui in American State of Hawaii had to be evacuated as parts of the island were razed to the ground by wildfires that burnt through large parts of western Maui. Days later, the focus seemed to have shifted to the Yellowknife province in Canada where another series of wildfires is leading to large-scale evacuation.

If it is not wildfire, tourists have been caught up in other kinds of problems, like sizzling temperatures of over 50°C, severe shortages of water, dried up lakes or rivers on which they were meant to do water sports or just swim and not to mention the missing snow from many peaks across this part of the world.

Spike in global warming and average temperatures around the world as well as frequent occurrence of extreme weather events, ranging from droughts to flashfloods are playing havoc with the tourism industry all over the world, but more so in the western nations.