The president of the hotel association: colleagues are calling in desperation asking what will happen now

By: Trademagazin Date: 2022. 08. 19. 10:38

Csaba Baldauf believes that what is coming now will be worse than Covid. He is sure that the number of hotels choosing seasonality will increase, and he also expects a decline in domestic tourism, but he does not expect that they will have to close due to Covid.

At the beginning of the year, I read that domestic tourism could break pre-epidemic records this year, but recently there were articles about the fact that the traffic is far behind the pre-epidemic level. What happened? Was the forecast wrong, or will the guests miss out?

There are many benchmarks, and in many cases journalists and the profession are not talking about the same thing. I can report on the performance of hotels in Hungary. 2019 was a record year in every respect. Anyone who did not perform well in the year before the epidemic did something wrong. In the following two years, however, the sector suffered despite the state aid. Without these, the losses would have been even greater, of course, significant problems also arose with them. In general, the summer data will be close to the record year of 2019, but the summer data of 2021 will be difficult to surpass.

This year, we ran it in such a way that we can see a marked demand, and the situation is already improving in Budapest. This statement was true and may still be true now. The market is reorganizing, new sending countries have appeared, while Russia and Ukraine have completely dropped out, but German and Austrian guests are also coming more restrained.