No flights, but Aussies still booking European river cruises and land tours

Amid the ongoing aviation crisis, luxury tour companies are seeing a boom in European river cruises and land tours.

Tauk managing director David Clark. Picture: Supplied

Despite the ongoing crisis buffeting the aviation sector, luxury tour companies are experiencing a post-lockdown boom in bookings.

Next year, the over 55s market in particular are booking luxury extended trips to Europe via river cruises or land-based coach tours.

“We are seeing a great resurgence in bookings and interest in Europe, in land and river cruises, in the Danube, the Rhine, the Douro, and the exotics like Morocco and in Iceland, there is huge interest across the board,’’ says Tauck’s Australian-based managing director, David Clark.

Connecticut-headquartered tour operator Tauck says most of its Australian clients hail from the east coast and are typically booking back-to-back seven day tours of Ireland, London, Paris, or the Italian region of Puglia. Portugal’s River Douro is particularly popular for those Australians who have already cruises the Rhine and the Danube, says Mr Clark.

However Mr Clark, who is actively recruiting more staff to service the company’s local operations, concedes that Australians are being held back by the lack of outbound air craft.

Travel agents are scrambling to find sufficient outbound flights given airlines are operating at around 60 per cent of pre-Covid capacity and none of the Chinese operators such as China Eastern and China Southern and Cathay Pacific have returned to Australian skies.

“We are having a lot of struggle with getting airfares, that is the feedback from our travel adviser partners,” Mr Clark said.

However, he said appetite from his Australian clients to book back-to-back land and river tours to make up for lost time during the pandemic is strong and clients are spending much more on travel than usual.

“For 2023 we are seeing our booking levels are back to about 2019 booking levels,’’ he said.

Meanwhile, Tauck’s American-based vice president of global sales, Steve Spivak, notes that his North American clients are willing to spend more money than before, people are booking longer journeys, putting three or four cruises together for the one trip, and are definitely wanting to piece trips together.

The family-owned Tauck company leases nine river ships in Europe and says it attracts cashed-up Australians because it uses The Savoy Hotel in London for its tours and says it’s the only tour company in Paris with after hours access to the Louvre.

It also has access to smaller museums and palaces in Austria once they have shut for the day.

In seven weeks’ time Tauck will also start welcoming North American tourists to Australian and New Zealand shores with a range of summer itineraries.

A Tauck ship. Source: Supplied