SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, Dec. 14 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The hotel and non-hotel establishments in the province of Santa Cruz de Tenerife associated with Ashotel already reach a level of reservations of 78% this Christmas holiday period (December 19 to January 8), according to the internal survey carried out by the hotel management through of its Tourism Competitiveness and Sustainability Observatory.
These are data that will increase as the holiday period approaches and are already closed sales and not occupancy expectations. By islands, La Palma (78.8%) and Tenerife (78.3%) exceed the provincial average, while La Gomera also registers a good level of reserves (74.4%) and El Hierro continues the trend of the latest surveys , with lower data (24.4%), but which is explained by last-minute reservations, which always raise this percentage considerably.
The internal survey was carried out between December 1 and 12 among the 252 open accommodation establishments associated with Ashotel on the four islands, which represent some 97,000 beds (63% of the total for the province), with a response level of more than 60 %.
The survey carried out by Ashotel for Christmas 2019 placed the occupancy forecasts -which do not reserve- in Tenerife at 88%, while in La Palma the forecast was 85%, in La Gomera 89% and in El Hierro del 65% In this year’s survey, 55% of the responses received affirm that the Christmas season will be better than in 2019, compared to 32% who think it will be the same and 12% that it will be worse.
In the analyzed period, the week with the best data is the one between December 26 and January 1, with an average of 85%, while the previous one closed with an average of 75% and the last one, already in January , with 74%.
Meanwhile, by areas of Tenerife, the south is the one that reaches the highest rate of reservations today, with 80.5%, while the north stands at 75.1% of its accommodation capacity during the season of Christmas and in the metropolitan area reservations are currently 50.3%.
TOURISM RECOVERY
The president and manager of Ashotel, Jorge Marichal and Juan Pablo González, presented these data this morning at a press conference, a call in which both made it clear that the path of tourism recovery started at Easter this year is consolidating .
“We continue to see that consumer trend that, after the pandemic, prefers to book more at the last minute,” said Marichal, who considered that the data is quite good. Despite this recovery in the tourism market, the president of Ashotel pointed out a negative aspect, related to the high operating costs, caused by the energy crisis and inflation. That is why he opted to talk about “profitability of the reserves and not so much of the millions of tourists we receive; in general we are happy, but not as happy as we could be”.
For his part, Juan Pablo González stopped at the analysis for each of the three weeks of the period studied by the Ashotel Observatory. “The behavior of each seven-day interval starts from a first week (12/19 to 12/25) with 75% reserves in the province, which rise in the second week (12/26 to 1/1) to 85 % to finish the last one at 74%,” he reported.
Regarding the good data that La Palma offers today, González recalled that the island has some 5,000 beds off the market, located in the exclusion zone of the volcano or even some that were devastated by the lava flows. This has led to a drop in the island’s accommodation capacity, a fact that is not attractive to some European tour operators, who have withdrawn their regular operations this winter, as reported by Ashotel last September.
MARKETS
Regarding the issuing markets to the Canary Islands, Marichal commented that during the pandemic there were some changes. Thus, the French issuer, which has not been very numerous in the Islands, has grown considerably in the last year, like the Italian, Belgian and Dutch, “which have come to occupy to a certain extent the gap left by the Germans and the Nordics, who have already started to recover”. The British follow a positive behavior and are currently the main market in Tenerife.
Lastly, Marichal emphasized the added value that the accommodation sector in Spain has brought to the tourism industry, as many establishments took advantage of the forced closure of the pandemic to reform and improve their facilities, which have reopened with an increase in categories and services.
The Tourism Competitiveness and Sustainable Development Observatory is Ashotel’s platform for surveillance, intelligence and prospective in sustainability, corporate responsibility and innovation in the accommodation sector in the Canary Islands. It is constituted within the guidelines of the Ashotel 2030 sustainability and digitization strategy that arises from the need to provide the accommodation sector with a roadmap for the promotion of more responsible and sustainable tourism.
