An analysis of the challenges facing tourism this year is made by hoteliers. We are going through a time when the investments in the expansion of the hotel units are a fact (and the hoteliers want to amortize them), while the renewal in the collective contract of the hotel employees is pending.
Reservations are lower than last year (and let's have more bed availability), while package prices are being pushed by tour operators to fall.
Hoteliers have come out strongly to communicate the low bookings that make them more pessimistic about this year's tourism course, while travel agents say they are more restrained, although they see that we are behind compared to last year.
Despite the fact that the flow of bookings for the coming Summer is slowing down, the Hoteliers Association expects that they will improve.
As PASYXE emphasizes, the treatment of this negative situation is done by the continuous monitoring of the developments, but also of the movements of our main competing destinations, participating dynamically in the last minute market.
PASYXE notes that what is not expected to improve in 2019 is the prices for tourist packages, because due to the uncertainty of Brexit, the Cypriot hoteliers offered significant discounts to the British tour operators, who pushed for price reductions of 10%. -15%, aiming to achieve the same number of visitors this year as last year.
According to hoteliers, there is already a significant increase in the choice of the British to spend their holidays in their country, eliminating the risk of being exposed financially in the event of significant fluctuations with the weakening of the exchange rate of sterling against the euro, but also looking forward to correspondingly high temperatures to be repeated this year as it happened during last summer.
Regarding the Russian market, hoteliers point out that in view of the significant devaluation of the ruble against the euro, which translates into a reduction in the purchasing power of Russians, it leads them to countries outside the euro (Turkey and Egypt are the winning countries). to which tour operators direct traffic).
Also, hoteliers report that in 2018, Germany was in 4th place as a source of tourism for Cyprus.
A brake on this growth is for 2019, the negative development with the recent bankruptcies of airlines such as Air Berlin and Cobalt, while the bankruptcy of Germania alone, caused the loss of about 50.000 seats.
Source: Philenews