The manager of the Alcudia-Can Picafort hoteliers association, Carmen Zierer, is reported as saying that 30% of hotel rooms in the two resorts will be open at the end of April.
Thirty per cent, at a rough estimate, would mean around 15,000 places, a figure which is optimistic in the extreme if the hope is that they will be occupied.
This isn’t in fact the hope, as the hotels which will open will be doing so in order to comply with contractual agreements with tour operators. There are hardly any new bookings as such. Reservations which exist are essentially ones that were reallocated from last year. But no one, including the hoteliers and tour operators, has any real idea how many, if any, will actually materialise.
It was always the case in the past that around this time of the year, I could go to the main tourist information office in Alcudia and get a list of all hotels and their projected opening dates. That information clearly doesn’t exist for this year, other than in respect of hotels which have contractual obligations.
As with 2020, it’s going to be a case of reacting to developments. The noises are more optimistic than they were. There is even some renewed hope about Easter, and it is being expressed in Germany as well as domestically. As an example, Alltours, which has its own hotels - Eden Alcudia, Eden Playa - has been making positive statements regarding Easter in Spain, but one suspects that the tour operator is looking more to the Canaries rather than Mallorca.
Meanwhile, cycling tourism has been wiped out. For all those who decry the cyclists, bear in mind that they have helped push occupancy levels to almost 80% between March and May. For the summer, Zierer has added another factor to the already long list of uncertainties, and that is that family holidays could be affected by proposals for summer schools to make up for lost teaching time.
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We can't have tourists back here until we're all vaccinated, end of. The cost of another skyrocketing of new cases here, and with the island full of tourists, would be far more than anyone could imagine. If our government fails to consider this we are in big trouble here....