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News
5 July 2020 2.00 h

Octavi Bono

Catalan Director General of Tourism

Many people will prefer natural spaces

We sense that the Pyrenees or coastal landscapes will recover much better than urban spaces

The ef­fects of Covid-19 on tourism, which rep­re­sents 12% of Cat­alo­nia’s GDP and 14% of em­ploy­ment, have been dev­as­tat­ing. Ac­cord­ing to a re­port by the Uni­ver­sity of Barcelona, di­rect losses in turnover amount to around 15 bil­lion euros (be­tween 25,708 and 28,250 over­all) and di­rect job losses are be­tween 82,000 and 95,000 (be­tween 128,952 and 150,000 over­all). But the sec­tor – mostly made up of SMEs – has the ca­pac­ity and re­sources to re­cover: sea, moun­tains, cities, gas­tron­omy and cul­ture.

The fig­ures we are talk­ing about are huge.

It’s crazy, whether we’re talk­ing about the 15 bil­lion euros in di­rect losses or 28 bil­lion over­all. And it’s the same if we talk about job losses. We’re now see­ing that overnight stays may fall by be­tween 57% and 69% in 2020, and the num­ber of vis­i­tors by be­tween 41% and 53%.

Let’s talk about re­cov­ery. Will there be two speeds in Cat­alo­nia? On the one hand the areas with moun­tains or sea and nat­ural land­scape and Barcelona on the other?

I think there are more nu­ances than that... We sense, as you say, that the Pyre­nees or coastal land­scapes will re­cover much bet­ter than urban spaces, which will be seen as more crowded en­vi­ron­ments, and there­fore less de­sired des­ti­na­tions. Des­ti­na­tions that may be per­ceived as crowded spaces will re­cover more slowly.

Will peo­ple pre­fer open spaces?

Nat­ural spaces free from large crowds will ob­vi­ously at­tract the ma­jor­ity, and for­tu­nately we have many in Cat­alo­nia: half the coun­try is nat­ural land­scape. There are also some types of es­tab­lish­ments that tourists will pre­fer: camp­sites or rural houses, for ex­am­ple, and for­tu­nately we have many of those too. In these new times, peo­ple will want to go to places where they don’t have to come in con­tact with masses of peo­ple, where there is space.

Is the sec­tor ready for this chal­lenge?
The sec­tor has emerged from pre­vi­ous crises and al­ways adapted to change. I fully trust our abil­ity to read­just now. If we look at the last 20 years, it’s amaz­ing what we’ve had to deal with: in 2003, for ex­am­ple, low-cost ar­rived and changed the con­cept of mo­bil­ity. But the in­dus­try adapted. The great mar­ket­ing plat­forms ap­peared. And the in­dus­try adapted. New mar­kets, the Rus­sians, Asians, and so on, ar­rived, and the sec­tor adapted again. The phe­nom­e­non of the col­lab­o­ra­tive econ­omy ap­peared, the cri­sis of 2008 passed... The sec­tor has adapted to every­thing and will do so again. But if for­eign tourists don’t come, we’ll be left short. The image of the Span­ish state say­ing it will open the bor­ders and then chang­ing its mind and the issue of quar­an­tine... none of that was good for us, and we told the Sec­re­tary of State that. In­for­ma­tion on quar­an­tine had a very neg­a­tive ef­fect on mar­kets. In France, for ex­am­ple, which is our main mar­ket, the re­ac­tion to the quar­an­tine was im­me­di­ate and book­ings stopped. They got a con­fus­ing mes­sage, which then caused a rec­i­p­ro­cal re­ac­tion. There was also con­fu­sion with Por­tu­gal, and now the bor­der will fi­nally open on July 1. I un­der­stand the com­plex­ity of it, but we need to be very care­ful. The bot­tom line is that the do­mes­tic mar­ket is not enough. The re­open­ing of bor­ders today is very im­por­tant.

out & about in­Ter­view

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