The agencies acknowledge the “excessive” increase in the price of hotels and assure that the December bank holiday has been “worse than expected” for national tourism due to the wave of cancellations due to bad weather
Travel agencies were one of the sectors most impacted by the pandemic. Proof of this is that they are the only one who managed to remain in the ERTE from April 1 -currently the RED Mechanism- with conditions similar to those of the pandemic until December 31, which they ask to extend until March. But the return of tourism has caused reservations to skyrocket and 64% of the agencies calculate that their turnover has been maintained or has improved compared to that of 2019, although 36% continue to say that it has worsened.
At a press conference, Carlos Garrido, president of the Spanish Confederation of Travel Agencies (CEAV) is “moderately optimistic” regarding the forecasts for 2023, since 29% of the agencies consider that their billing will improve, compared to 13, 7% who believe it will get worse. He assured that hotel and transportation prices have remained more stable when contracting with an agency than directly with the operator because they contracted rates before inflation soared.
In this sense, Garrido considered the price increase that hotels are registering “excessive” (the average room was close to 100 euros in October, 16% more than in 2019, according to INE data) as a result of the effects of costs energy, increased personnel and food costs. Despite this price increase, the desire to travel is intense and Garrido positively valued the December long weekend that ended this Sunday, but only in international destinations, which account for 75% of the sales of travel agencies.
And it is that bad weather, with rains in almost all of Spain, has caused thousands of people to cancel their national trips at the last moment. “The data from the bridge at the national level are worse than expected due to the effect of time, although it has not affected the departure of Spanish tourists abroad,” said Garrido, who confirmed that more trips have been made on this December bridge abroad than on the same dates in 2019.
The pandemic affected the sector so much that, according to CEAV data, there are 10% of the points of sale that closed in 2020 and have not yet opened, representing some 800 travel companies. In addition, Garrido explained that in large companies there has been a concentration to better weather the crisis, while small ones have tended to disperse.
Regarding the thousands of trip cancellations that occurred in the first months of the pandemic, Garrido assured that tourists who booked without an agency had more problems getting their money back than those who had an intermediary. In fact, he confirmed that there are still some cases of providers that have not returned to the agencies all the amount that they had to advance to the clients at that time.
To give the sector a boost, he asked the authorities to withdraw the mandatory use of masks on planes, as airlines have done on several occasions, since Spain is the only EU country that maintains this rule. Garrido described it as “nonsense” because he assures that there are tourists who prefer to go to the United States with a non-Spanish airline to avoid having to wear a mask for so many hours, which harms companies and the national economy.
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