Anna Borduzha, Business Develpment Manager at Mabrian Technologies, the Travel Intelligence provider for the travel industry and Smart Destinations, comments: “When analysing main Mediterranean vacational destinations – Greece, Turkey, Italy, Spain and Portugal – during this summer season, we have noticed that, in general, hotel prices have experienced a big increase compared to the average prices of 2019.
“Greece is, by far, the Mediterranean destination that has experienced the highest increase – growing at 31% for four stars hotels and 47% for five stars hotels. On the contrary, Turkey is the only Mediterranean country that has experienced a drop — of 4% — when it comes to three stars hotels”.
“What could be behind this? Whilst it is perhaps too soon and there are so many factors to make a definitive judgement, there are nonetheless many important points to consider.
“Firstly, as many hotels still remain closed or only open partially, evidently this affects prices: less supply always increases prices if demand remains stable.
“Equally the increase in prices in the five star category can perhaps be partly explained by the fact that more wealthy travellers have been less affected by the economic crisis derived from de pandemic and are not put off by the high costs of PCR test. We’ve seen some evidence too that those that are travelling for holidays are spending longer periods of time in the destination, thus pushing up the total demand. There are of course other points to consider that might take more time for economists to analyse, including that hotels might be having to increase prices as their cost base has gone up due to COVID measures and / or needing to make up for lost revenues.
“Finally, there is of course one other factor to consider and that is that international travel – and by that we mean transatlantic trips or journeys to Asia, and so on – have been reduced to a small fraction of their former levels. Desire to travel though has remained high so perhaps some of those people who previously wanted to do a trip from Europe to America or Asia – or indeed a cruise, which have almost entirely stopped -are now instead travelling in Europe, creating demand that previously would never have been there.
“Whatever the underlying cause of this – and our estimation is that it is a combination of all the factors we mention – overall clearly this is encouraging to see the Travel and Hospitality sector restarting and showing a great resilience capacity”.
