The hospitality industry was amongst the first industries affected by the coronavirus generated crisis, and it will be amongst the last sectors to recover. The road to recovery involves learning how to make the hotel experience a safer one and this year will bring fresh trends in the hospitality area - a concentration on minimizing food waste, care for green buildings and sustainability and locally produced products and a proactive interest for smart devices planned to diminish energy consumption are just a few trends intended to shape a more sustainable future starting 2021, shows the 2020 annual report released by Colliers.
“Either way, the medium-term outlook remains challenging. Globally, tourism has fallen in 2020 to a 30-year low in terms of activity. In Europe, as per a World Tourism Organization survey, most tourism experts are seeing the return of activity to pre-pandemic levels of international travel no sooner than 2023. Furthermore, the survey also mentioned that a more material recovery in international travel should come in the second half of 2021 – likely dependent on vaccination, but quite a few see this as rather a 2022 event. We would expect Romania to follow suit and rebound at a similar pace to other European countries. And while Romania as a whole did not rely that much on foreign tourists (the country had one of the lower numbers of international visitors in CEE), Bucharest will suffer, as it did see an increasing amount of both business and leisure tourism in the run-up to the coronavirus pandemic”, explains Raluca Buciuc, Partner & Head of Valuation Services and Hospitality Advisory Services at Colliers.
“In a normal year, at a 4-star hotel which allowed for private events, these services added around 40% of the annual revenue, while for the sought-after 5-star hotels, the share easily jumped the 50% threshold. Interestingly, newer and more flexible hotels may be somewhat more advantaged by this situation, as they tended to place a slightly lower emphasis on restaurants/events. We see 2021 as a good year for new international brands to enter the market or existing ones to expand their network, as long as the projects under discussions are well located and sizable enough to support the business model. 2022 is expected to be the year of a normalized activity and therefore we see the long-term players preparing the ground for it”, adds Anca Merdescu, Associate Director Investment Services at Colliers.
