The German TUI Group is one of the world’s largest tourism companies, operating 1,600 travel agencies and its own airlines, hotels, and cruise liners. As documented by GLAN and SOMO, several of its subsidiaries offer guided tours that are solely branded as visiting Israel but include sites in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and the occupied Syrian Golan. While the tours can currently not be booked, TUI’s Dutch subsidiary TUI Nederland N.V. advertises on its website several group tours that visit the settlement Qumran National Park. GLAN and SOMO described how the national park and adjacent parking lot for tour buses were formerly used by indigenous Palestinian Bedouin communities. These communities have increasingly been forcibly displaced from their ancestral land and are subject to restrictions on access to land, water, electricity and other infrastructure and basic services. The tours are labelled as visiting “Israel and Jordan” and “Highlights of Israel”. Another example was a tour offered by TUI Belgium, “Back to the beginning – Israel”, that could still be booked in June 2023. It included visits to Bethlehem in the OPT, the occupied Golan Heights, and sights in occupied East Jerusalem.

TUI Group’s activities are concerning as they are supporting the existence of illegal settlements and contribute to their normalisation.