Dutch travel organisations have begun repatriating tourists and businesses are evacuating their staff from Egypt where a popular uprising against President Hosni Mubarak’s regime has led to increasing insecurity.

Tour operators Tui, Thomas Cook and Oad have announced they will repatriate more than 3,000 holidaymakers over the next few days. On Monday and Tuesday, KLM-Air France will use bigger jets for its regular flights to and from the Egyptian capital Cairo to Schiphol. The move will allow the airline to carry an additional 100 passengers per flight.

Travel warning
Dutch multinationals like Heineken,Shell and Unilever are either busy making preparations or have already begun evacuating their staff. Heineken has told local staff to halt production until further notice.

The Dutch foreign ministry has updated its travel advisory to Egypt and now warns against all travel and urges Dutch citizens to leave. The Dutch embassy in Cairo is difficult to reach due to disruptions of local telephone and internet services.

On Saturday everything was still business as usual, but that changed in the course of Sunday afternoon, even though the situation in popular resorts such as Hurghada, Sharm el-Sheikh, Marsa Alam and Taba is still calm. Thousands of tourists, staff of foreign companies and concerned Egyptians have travelled to Cairo airport hoping to be able to leave the country at short notice, but most flights have been delayed and demand hugely outstrips supply.

Duty Free war zone
Dutchman Etiënne Schuyt, who is stranded at Cairo airport, has told Dutch public radio that there is a general dearth of information. “The main problem is that ... there is very little staff here, and because there is a curfew, people cannot reach the airport to go to work.”

Mr Schuyt and about 1,000 other passengers spent the night in the airport departure lounge, while many more people were trying to get in. He wanted to go to an airport hotel but was told that was too dangerous. Mr Schuyt said there was not enough food at the airport. Only one cafeteria was still open in the Duty Free area, which Mr Schuyt said “resembled a kind of war zone”. Passengers were fighting over the limited quantities of drinks and pizzas handed out there.

‘Zero degrees never felt so good’
A tourist who arrived at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport on one of two flights to arrive from Cairo early this morning said: "Television reports made it scary, otherwise we would not have noticed a thing. However I’m glad we were among the first to leave. I was getting really scared."

Another tourist who was vacationing in Sharm el-Sheikh with her boyfriend says the resort were she was staying did not provide any information on the protests. “We had no access to the internet and were not allowed to leave the hotel grounds. We were desperate for information, because we knew nothing about what was going on and the staff were not allowed to talk about politics. Everthing was fine they said."

A flight from Cairo which arrived at Schiphol on Sunday evening already had a number of Dutch tourists on board. A woman who spent a week in the Egyptian capital was adamant: "We are never ever going to do this again. We were staying on the outskirts of Cairo, so … it was only when we got to the airport that we noticed something was wrong. It is a major shambles there. Huge numbers of people are trying to get out without a ticket … I’m glad to be back in the Netherlands. Zero degrees never felt so good."

(gsh/imm)