Your Co-op Travel Pulls Plug on SeaWorld Ticket Sales

The U.K.’s Largest Member-Owned Travel Agent Drops Captive-Cetacean Abusement Parks

For Immediate Release:
May 27, 2021

Contact:
David Perle 202-483-7382

Your Co-op Travel has joined a long list of companies that have stopped promoting SeaWorld—including Booking.com, Tripadvisor, and United Airlines—following discussions with PETA and its affiliates.

PETA is calling for all travel agents and operators to stop promoting and selling SeaWorld tickets, as dolphins—including orcas—and other marine animals suffer when they’re confined to cramped concrete tanks.

Your Co-op Travel has confirmed that its retail branches, website, and tour packages (Co-op Holidays) will stop selling tickets to SeaWorld—the world’s most notorious marine abusement park—and all other parks that confine highly intelligent cetaceans in the name of entertainment.

“Your Co-op Travel has officially rejected marine-mammal prisons like SeaWorld, where sensitive, complex, naturally far-ranging aquatic animals are kept in cramped tanks,” says PETA U.K. Director of Corporate Projects Yvonne Taylor. “No travel provider should profit from animal abuse, and PETA urges TUI—which is still giving a financial lifeline to SeaWorld—to follow suit.”

In nature, orcas, other dolphins, and beluga whales lead the kinds of lives that animals in captivity are denied. Those living in the ocean can maintain dynamic relationships in large social networks, choose their own partners, and swim free in the vast expanse of water. Following a vigorous PETA campaign, SeaWorld stopped breeding orcas—but it’s still breeding belugas and bottlenose dolphins (sometimes forcibly, after drugging them), and all the marine mammals at its parks are still confined to small concrete tanks. PETA is calling on SeaWorld to end its sordid breeding programs and develop seaside sanctuaries.

More companies that have stopped promoting SeaWorld include Virgin Holidays, British Airways Holidays, STA Travel, WestJet, JetBlue, and Southwest Airlines as well as many individual AAA clubs, including Arizona; Colorado; Minneapolis; Northeast; Northern California, Nevada & Utah; and Washington.

PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit SeaWorldOfHurt.com or follow PETA on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.