Britain’s biggest holiday company has cancelled the vast majority of its packages for July.

Tui will resume operations on 11 July – so long as the government relaxes its warning against all but essential travel abroad and eases the quarantine rules for returning holidaymakers.

But just 8,300 customers will travel with the company in the three weeks to the end of July. This represents only 4 per cent of the original planned capacity, with fewer than 400 passengers on a typical day.

Before the coronavirus pandemic, Tui carried an average of 74,000 travellers daily in its worldwide operations.

The holiday firm is hoping to increase to 50 per cent of holidays in August.

Initially, Tui will use only three airports in the UK: Gatwick, Birmingham and Manchester.

Only eight destinations will be served, all of them islands: four in Spain and four in Greece.

The Balearic islands of Mallorca and Ibiza will be first to welcome Tui holidaymakers, with simultaneous departures at 6.40am on 11 July from Birmingham to Palma and Gatwick to Ibiza.

The Canary Islands of Lanzarote and Tenerife are the other two Spanish destinations.

Spain opened its frontiers to British holidaymakers on Sunday.

Greece has yet to reveal its plans for UK travellers from July onwards, but Tui expects to offer holidays to the islands of Corfu, Crete, Kos and Rhodes.

Andrew Flintham, managing director for Tui UK & Ireland, said: “With all of the uncertainty over the last few months, we’ve left announcing our planned summer holiday programme as late as possible so that we could offer those who want to travel the option to do so, while providing them with as much reassurance and certainty as possible.

“While we are still waiting for the government to change its advice for travel, we’ve worked hard to ensure this can happen safely.

“While things might look a little different across the flying and holiday experience, I’m confident that most of the things we all love to enjoy on holidays, will still be there for us to enjoy.

“Package holidays in particular probably have the best chance of providing the reassurance customers need, because quality control is assured from departure, through to the experience in-destination to the return trip home.”

Hundreds of thousands of Tui customers with bookings from other airports or to other destinations in July will be contacted in departure date order to be offered a full cash refund or the chance to rebook.

The company is allowing anyone booked up to 31 August to postpone their trip without penalty.

Jet2 Holidays, Tui’s nearest rival, is planning a much wider range of packages to run from 15 July, with departures from many UK airports to Spain, Portugal, Greece, Malta, Croatia, Bulgaria and Turkey.

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