UNSIGHTLY buildings could be demolished and up to 10,000 low quality tourist beds could be got rid of if a multi-million pound plan currently being worked on by the Cyprus Tourism Organisation (CTO) is implemented.
At the end of last September, the total number of tourist beds on the island was close to 96,000, most of which were hotel and hotel apartment beds.
Individual tourist apartment buildings account for around 10,000 beds, and rural homes, guest houses, villas and camping sites make up the remainder.
Senior CTO official Lefkos Phylactides told the Cyprus Mail yesterday that the main targets of the scheme would be the lower quality tourist apartment buildings that had sprung up during the ’eighties and early ’nineties when controls were lax. The majority of these buildings were given tourist licences en masse by parliament at various intervals.
Yesterday, Phylactides said these were the ones that had suffered the most from the decline in tourism over the past two or three years. Most of them are in urban areas and mainly in the centre of Ayia Napa, he said. The practice of licencing illegal apartments has now been halted, but it has left the legacy of a tarnished mass market image on the island’s tourism.
“These are the ones that will probably make use of the incentives and leave the tourist industry,” he said. “They are also the ones facing problems of viability. They have very low demand and very low occupancy. We are only talking about apartments in the urban centres of holiday resorts, primarily in the centre of Ayia Napa, and during the slump in demand over the last one or two years, these establishments were the hardest hit. Perhaps circumstances are right for them to take advantage of the incentives.”
Phylactides said the island’s new tourism strategy proposed a scheme for the withdrawal of these lower quality beds. He said that a specific study was under way and would be completed in the first half of this year.
The scheme would be three pronged, Phylactides said. Either it could offer cash incentives to proprietors to withdraw their beds or licences could be withdrawn on the basis of failed minimum standards. The third option, which is already in the discussion stage with the Town Planning Department, would be to allow owners a change in the building coefficients of their plots to encourage them to turn to another line of business or demolish them entirely.
Phylactides said that although EU regulations banned cash grants, there was a ceiling of 100,000 euros that could be given out over a three-year period. “So this is one opportunity available,” he said.
The study, which is to be completed this year, cannot however be implemented before 2005 because no provision has been made in the 2004 budget for the cash needed to pull it off.
“We are not talking about a few thousands pounds but several million,” said Phylactides. “We are probably talking about 10,000 beds at the moment so even if you assume £1,000 per bed you are immediately talking about £10 million, which is a lot of money for which there is no provision.”
Tourism, which accounts for some 20 per cent of GDP, has been on the decline since 2000 when arrivals numbered 2.68 million and revenue reached £1.2 billion for the first time.
Numbers were expected to rocket 15 per cent in 2001, but only increased by a marginal 0.39 per cent following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
In 2002, the industry was plagued by the fallout from September 11, which badly affected the global airline industry. The year ended with tourism 10 per cent down at 2.4 million. Last year, the problems were compounded by the war in Iraq, and tourism ended five per cent down on 2002 at 2.27 million.
However, experts say that, despite the external influences, tourism in Cyprus was already in trouble. Statistics compiled in the UK showed bookings were already on a downward trend prior to 2001 because many believed Cyprus was pricing itself out of the market.
