Now First Choice has said it will allow customers to amend their holidays until the end of August without charge. Thomas Cook is also waiving its £30 amendment charge until further notice.

While customers are not being allowed to cancel holidays, a discretionary line is being adopted by some operators towards family with young children after the bombings that is throught to have killed 88 people, including 11 Britons. There is no hard and fast rule but some holiday firms sensitive to criticsm are allowing staff to amend, or cancel, in certain situations.

Another tour operator, MyTravel, had 1,117 customers in the Sharm el Sheikh area at the time of the bombings and that seven were unaccounted for. A total of 220 MyTravel customers had been staying at the Ghazala Gardens hotel which was the target of one of the bombs. In a statement to the Stock Exchange yesterday, the company said it was continuing to operate normally to Egypt and that those with future bookings to Ghazala Gardens were being offered alternative accommodation, alternative bookings or refunds.

The softer approach from operators comes as Egypt claims visitors to Sharm el-Sheikh should recover by November. The country’s tourism minister, Ahmed el-Maghrabi, said today: “We have some cancellations and some early departures in Sharm el-Sheikh, but in the first couple of weeks that is to be expected.”

“I think the effects on Sharm el-Sheikh will start to peter out by the beginning of our winter season, which starts November 1,” he said. Tourism, also Egypt’s biggest earner of foreign exchange, shrugged off attacks which killed 34 in Egyptian Red Sea resorts north of Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2004, with year-on-year visitor numbers rising sharply every month uninterrupted.

Visitor numbers also rose 13 per cent year-on-year in April, 2005, despite an April 7 attack which killed three tourists in Cairo. “I would imagine that there will be a slow-down in the new reservations to Sharm. Other reservations to other destinations in Egypt have not been affected in a detectable way,” Maghrabi said.

Sharm el-Sheikh had been fully booked for August, but after the bombings hotel occupancy rate for the month might fall to 65 percent, he said. The expected fall off has seen some UK operators, including Thomas Cook, more than halve the price of holidays in Sharm during August to £299.

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