Mallorca travel agencies: Bookings down 30% in March

Xisco Mulet, president of the Balearic Travel Agencies Association

Xisco Mulet of Aviba. | Jaume Morey

Majorca Daily Bulletin reporterPalma22/03/2022 11:27

Travel agencies in the Balearics experienced good sales in February. However, since the war started in Ukraine they have seen sales fall. For March, says the president of the Aviba association, Xisco Mulet, bookings are down some 30%.

There is a lifeline for the travel agencies and this comes in the form of the RED Mechanism. The Spanish government has adopted this as a form of ERTE furlough for sectors that are having particular difficulties. It will apply from the first of April.

Mulet calculates that some 500 employees in the Balearics will benefit from this new type of coverage, which was included in the recent reform of labour legislation.

There were still almost 1,200 employees on ERTE terms in the Balearics when the scheme expired at the end of February, so an extension of some sort was demanded by certain sectors. The hope had been that employees' situations would be normalised, and business in February suggested that this would be the case. But then came the war in Ukraine.