Spanish hoteliers want the same coronavirus measures across the country to make travel easier and more attractive. Small and medium-sized hotel chains look forward to the summer with some optimism, but are still concerned about the period after the state of Alarm.

They fear that after 9 May, when the state of Alarm officially ends, chaos will arise if measures are not carefully coordinated across the country and each autonomous region can draw up its own restrictive measures. Spanish travel in their own country must be made attractive in anticipation of the return of international tourism.

For Victoria López, director of the Fedola group with 5 hotels in the Canary Islands, it is very important that the 17 autonomous communities in Spain agree on the same measures and not each their own decisions. In the Canary Islands, “we missed the summer of 2020 and the winter of 2020-21, so we need at least one summer of 2021 that, even though it will be bad compared to normal summers, gives us a little hope,” López told EfeTur.

A chain hotel has already opened. Three more hotels will be added in the summer. However, the strategy is focused on the winter season from 2021-2022, as a significant upturn in reservations has been recorded for this period.

The director-general of the Port, Near of all the hotels on the Costa Blanca, in the city of Valencia, Rafael Blanquer, points out that the most important thing at the moment is that our organizations to be agile, with a very great capacity of adaptation”. People are ready to get to work as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

Since June last year, the chain has been able to keep a hotel in Elche (Alicante) open thanks to the Football teams that stay there, after Elche Club de Fútbol moved to the first division.

Blanquer foresees that “with a bit of luck “his hotel group will be able to open” something ” in May and that in June the national market will pick up a bit more and from July the international market. “But until september we expect nothing important”.

Agustí Codina, director of Med Playa (with hotels on the Costa Brava, Costa de Maresme, Salou, Benidorm, Costa del Sol and Costa del Mar Negro), is optimistic about the summer because “I see we are already at the end of the crisis”.

According to Codina, the beginning of the recovery will not be black or white, but rather a grey transition area. An area that should be kept as short as possible in time.

The hotel chain is particularly dependent on British tourism in some coastal areas, and the director believes that, in addition to vaccination, a major factor is that holidaymakers have not been able to spend any more on holidays during All months of the pandemic and that money has been saved as a result. According to him, the UK, for example, is worth EUR 208.6 billion.

According to Codina,”of course it will not be an extraordinary summer, but it could be a good summer that will lead us to a better autumn, because it will probably last longer”. He predicts that 2021 will be better than we now think and that the tourist regions will have a few good years ahead.

Ramón Braña, General Manager of Oca Hotels (with offices in Galicia, Asturias, Burgos and Brazil), expects a small recovery for the summer, but is concerned about the lack of international tourism during the winter season. In addition, Braña believes that it will be difficult to recover the business market because much is now being regulated online.

“The vaccine is our antidote to recovery, and also that the autonomous communities agree at some point on the measures to be taken, so that, although we do not have international tourism, National Tourism is getting started by people taking advantage of this situation to get to know their own country better,” Braña added.