With the 2020 season in its final death throes, the hotel industry in Minorca is planning for 2021 amidst great uncertainty. The expectation is that tourism activity will take time to recover. There is a view that it will be 2023 before figures equivalent to those of 2019 will be recorded.
Max Weinbinder, CEO of Carema Hotels, says that their budgets for 2021 are taking into account what studies indicate will be a year of transition. He hopes that the experts are wrong, but the forecasts are that two seasons (2021 and 2022) will pass before normality can be restored.
For next year, "everyone agrees that occupancy will be very low". There is an additional handicap, he notes, in that Easter week is end of March and the start of April and so well removed from the beginning of the official tourism season in May. He believes that a vaccine and its availability will be the determining factor for next season.
The president of the Minorca Hoteliers Association, Luis Casals, acknowledges that studies point to 2023 being the year for a return to normality. Right now, the association is focused on creating safe air corridors, and he trusts that there will be differential treatment based on the health data, which in Minorca are far better than Majorca and Ibiza.
Casals says that income this year is around 25% of what it should be. "We have suffered a very severe blow", and what hotels now need is liquidity in order to be able to preserve jobs.