Ómicron triggers hotel reservation cancellations in January
2022 started slowly, with some difficulties but with the conviction that it could be a much better year than 2021, and definitely totally different from 2020. Although this past year was not the best year for hotels, even December was thought to be a good month for reservations, however, hotel reservations were below expectations, an aspect that we hope to recover in the coming months of this new year.
However, as reported by the newspaper ABC of Spain, the sixth wave of infections has ended causing an avalanche of cancellations for the month of January and a lot of uncertainty for future months. In fact, a situation that is returning is last minute reservations, which evidently denote the distrust of tourists. The most touristy communities are the ones that are suffering the most. Especially the Canary Islands. After the bankruptcy of Thomas Cook, in 2019, and the Covid, in 2020, the Canarian hoteliers had hopes of a good tourist high season in 2021. This has been the case until November. In December, the employers of the Tenerife sector spoke of the fact that employment has ended up falling ten points because of Ómicron, to 62%. For his part, Tom Smulders, the vice president of the Federation of Hospitality and Tourism Entrepreneurs of the province of Las Palmas, says that a good part of the cancellations have been by “British tourists.”
In the Valencian Community, the Hosbec employers’ association says that Ómicron “has ruined the good forecasts that the sector had for Christmas and has charged between 20 and 30 hotel occupancy points.” Thus, the employer’s association made official yesterday that December has ended with an occupation between 37 and 45%, “very far from the 80% forecasts that were handled before Ómicron.” In addition, he speaks of a beginning of the year where “we have weeks of significant difficulties ahead of us.”
For the large Spanish hotel chains, the sixth wave has also broken all their forecasts. A few weeks ago, in a meeting with the press, the CEO of Barceló, Raúl González, stated that reservations in November grew by 10% compared to 2019. Three weeks later, after detecting the Ómicron variant, reservations fell 15%. This volatility blurs the recovery into a quicksand path.
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