Holidays in times of coronavirus

Tourism has al­ways been one of Cat­alo­nia’s eco­nomic en­gines. Its weight rep­re­sents more than 12 per cent of Cata­lan GDP, while in the EU as a whole, the fig­ure does not reach 4 per cent. Right now, how­ever, tourism is one of the sec­tors that has been hit hard­est by the ef­fects of the Covid-19 pan­demic, with an ex­pected rise in un­em­ploy­ment, busi­ness clo­sures and busi­ness losses to lev­els unimag­in­able just three or four months ago. That is why ex­perts and pro­fes­sion­als are won­der­ing what the fu­ture holds for this sec­tor, what will be left of the cur­rent tourism model and what tourism will look like from now on. One thing seems clear for the sum­mer sea­son: most Eu­ro­peans will de­cide to go on hol­i­day in their home coun­try. “na­tional” tourism is back!

Peo­ple will de­vote their re­sources to a hol­i­day closer to their home, which will allow them to spend less money and re­dis­cover their coun­try. This has forced the tourism sec­tor to re­fo­cus their cam­paigns on local con­sumers, a mar­ket that had been con­sid­ered lost and re­placed by for­eign tourism. Al­though the drop in turnover will be se­vere, the sec­tor is try­ing to rein­vent it­self and make a com­mit­ment to two de­ci­sive fac­tors: prox­im­ity and qual­ity.

The other risk hov­er­ing over the tourism in­dus­try is un­cer­tainty. How the air trans­port sys­tem will be re­built, how health se­cu­rity mea­sures will af­fect es­tab­lish­ments such as ho­tels and restau­rants, what spend­ing cuts fam­i­lies will have to face with the fear of how the eco­nomic re­ces­sion will af­fect them, and so on.

How­ever, there is one thing that the virus and lock­down have not been able to elim­i­nate, but rather have stim­u­lated: the de­sire to go on hol­i­day, to leave home and to get to­gether with friends, to re­visit for­got­ten land­scapes. And for­tu­nately, Cat­alo­nia has plenty to offer. This sum­mer issue of­fers you a wide range of routes around Cat­alo­nia, which will help you re­dis­cover the coun­try’s hid­den gems of sea and moun­tain land­scape, cul­ture, lo­cally sourced gas­tron­omy, en­ter­tain­ment, his­tory... a wide range of qual­ity for the whole fam­ily, with safety taken into ac­count. Now we have en­tered the “new nor­mal“ (what­ever that means), we must take ad­van­tage of every op­por­tu­nity pre­sented to us, and enjoy the well-de­served hol­i­days. You never know, a new lock­down might be wait­ing for us when we get back...