Celebrities, including singer Will Young and former Strictly Come Dancing professional Flavia Cacace, have urged TUI to stop selling and promoting tours and activities where captive dolphins and whales are used for entertainment.
They’ve joined singer Alesha Dixon and other famous faces who have signed an open letter asking TUI Group to stop selling tickets to venues that breed dolphins, including SeaWorld and Loro Parque.
World Animal Protection, which wrote the letter, said TUI promotes ‘marine parks where whales and dolphins perform unnatural tricks for tourists’.
It added: “In these parks, these highly intelligent, sociable animals are confined to barren, sterile enclosures and stripped from any natural environment.
“TUI lends social licence to a cruel industry and risks long-term damage to its brand for short-term profit by this cruelty.
“TUI’s 2024 animal welfare policy promised progress, claiming that ‘they prohibit, among other things, breeding for commercial purposes’. It has failed to live up to this claim.”
The letter follows a World Animal Protection-organised protest outside TUI’s headquarters in Hanover, Germany, supported by 20 animal protection NGOS from across Europe . Trucks and poster bikes also drove around the city displaying a video of a captive dolphin and a fake orca was delivered to TUI’s headquarters on a stretcher as part of the convoy.
Travel Gossip has asked TUI UK for a comment.
