LATEST available figures for tourism show an 11 per cent drop in arrivals for 2009, and a 17 per cent drop in revenue, Cyprus Hotels Association (PASYXE) President Haris Loizides said yesterday.
If the tourism industry was to stand any chance of recovering, dogmatic thinking, bureaucratic snags and time-consuming procedures” needed to be left far behind,” said Loizides.
“What is mainly needed is immediate mobilisation – today, not tomorrow.”
Speaking at a lunch following PASYXE’s extraordinary general meeting, Loizides said “an even bigger worry” than the 2009 figures was “the fact that these results are much worse than those of our main competitor destinations, due mainly to the degraded competitiveness of our tourist product”.
Loizides said that evidence of the negative indications for 2010 is provided by the fact that one unnamed major tour operator “decided recently to drastically reduce its charter flights to Malta from 28 per week to just two, with a parallel drastic increase of its programmes towards Turkey”.
He added that the problem of uncompetitiveness and prospects for 2010 are made worse by the euro’s unfavourable exchange rates against sterling and the Russian rouble, which has “had a negative impact on all tourist destinations in the eurozone and a positive one for destinations such as Turkey, Egypt, Morocco and other emerging destinations.”
The PASYXE lunch was attended by Finance Minister Charilaos Stavrakis, Commerce & Tourism Minister Antonis Paschalides and Labour & Social Insurance Minister Sotiroulla Charalambous, as well as members of parliament, senior representatives of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation (CTO), and representatives of other official bodies from the tourism sector.
Loizides added that despite the government’s welcome and continued measures to support the tourism sector, which among other things allowed lay-offs in the sector to be limited to anticipated levels, the tour operators “continue to be very unresponsive to our market”, leading to a 10 per cent increase in hotels deciding to close completely for the winter.
Loizides said that the hotels sector in particular is waiting impatiently for the government to announce the details of specific programmes to implement its decision earlier in the year to guarantee loans for renovating and modernising hotels.
He added that the banking sector would also be expected to “co-operate positively by gradually reducing the high cost of loans and by strengthening business liquidity” through funds drawn under the government’s recent €3 billion bond issue.
