Sehrs airlines has signed a deal to fly six times a week into Almería airport, bringing, we hope, lots of eager tourists on every flight. The flights will initially run between May and September 2011, with an option to continue.
If you’ve never heard of Sehrs, it’s because it’s an Eastern European low cost charter operator, and will be flying to Slovakia, Poland and the Czech Republic, two flights a week.
The company also signed a deal with the Junta to fly into Huelva and Málaga, and is expected to bring in tourism totalling around 1 million hotel nights a year (the Junta’s way of calculating the value of tourism, not mine).
Another operator is expected to sign up shortly to bring in tourists from Romania, Bulgaria and Estonia.
All this magic happened at the World Travel Fair currently ongoing in London.
Luciano, our old friend the head of tourism, says that he’s had some “very interesting” conversations with Thomas Cook about returning to Almería, and said he told them “Almeria hotel operators are very upset you abandoned the province, which left a large hole, and you should come back”. He’s apparantly unaware that Thomas Cook, an entity much bigger (and better run) than the Junta de Andalucia has already signed a deal to start shipping in the portable subburnt money dispensers to several Roquetas hotels in 2011.
They’ll fly in full and fly out empty. Now that’s tourism!