January's tourism disaster: each hotel received an average of 12 visitors per day
January 2021 will go down in history as a tourism disaster as figures hit a new low. There were only 252 hotels open in the whole archipelago during the month, which is 45% of the total, which had 88,850 people stay in them (including local and national tourists), giving a daily balance of 12 visitors a day staying in them on average, some in complexes with more than 1,000 rooms.
The number of travellers that stayed is in no comparison to the 660,000 in January 2020, and it is of course foreign tourist numbers that are down the most as a result of the restrictions and confinements applied in the main tourism markets the Canary Islands of Germany and the United Kingdom.
In January, only 47,217 foreigners stayed in hotels in the Canary Islands compared to the almost 600,000 who did so a year earlier, according to data provided yesterday by the Canarian Confederation of Entrepreneurs (CCE). Its fall is 92.5% in a January in which tourist occupancy in the whole archipelago stood at 15.74% of open hotels.
Low levels of tourist reception and occupation have an inevitable impact on employment. According to data provided by the CCE yesterday, in January the staff employed in hotels on the islands amounted to 13,101 people compared to 48,351 in January 2020, before the Covid crisis broke out.
The figures indicate that last month only 27% of the island's hotel staff were still active, the rest are assumed to be in the ERTEs.
The cutback in activity leads the Canary Islands tourism sector to lose weight on a national level. While in January 2020 the islands represented 23% of the national tourist activity by having 254,493 operational beds in its 555 hotels, last month the island's weight has dropped to 16%, having only 89,190 open beds in 252 establishments.
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In terms of employment, the islands have also fallen from 31% to 26.4% of total tourism nationally, and the hope for the Canary Islands and its tourism sector is progress in vaccination, according to the CCE.