Havana, September 21 (EFE). Spain’s Iberostar chain announced this Tuesday that it will reopen 16 of the 17 hotels it operates in Cuba and will open another facility in Cayo Cruz between November and January 2022, in the context of the reopening of the Caribbean nation’s borders.
Iberostar’s marketing director in Havana, Alexei Torres, told the press that the new phase would maintain sanitary protocols and would include a medical and epidemiological team at each hotel, among other measures.
He also announced the opening of the Coral Level Esmeralda Hotel in Cayo Cruz, located in the Jardin del Rey archipelago north of the province of Camaguey (central), and the opening of the inaugural flight tomorrow Wednesday for Air World2Fly to connect Madrid and Havana.
Iberostar thus joins Spain’s Meliá – both based in Palma de Mallorca – which will also reopen its hotels in Cuba in November, when a mass coronavirus vaccination is expected to be developed.
The company has operated hotels since 1993 in Havana, Cayo Largo del Sur, Varadero, Trinidad and the Northern Keys of the central provinces of Villa Clara and Ciego de Avila.
It operates in cooperation with Spanish Meliá and Barceló 70% of rooms in government hotels on the island through management contracts.
The Caribbean nation suspended commercial and charter flights in April 2020 to stem the expansion of the coronavirus and in October of that year reopened airports, but with minimal flights from the United States, Mexico, Panama, the Bahamas, Haiti and the Republic. Dominican and Colombia.
Before the pandemic, tourism was Cuba’s second official source of foreign currency income only after the sale of professional services abroad and contributed about 10% of the GDP.
Cuba received 225,417 foreign tourists and travelers in the January-May period, about two million fewer than in the same period in 2020, according to the National Office of Statistics and Information (ONEI).
The Caribbean country aspires in 2020 to receive about 4.5 million international visitors and reverse a 9.3% drop in 2019, when 4.2 million tourists traveled to the country, 436,352 fewer than in 2018, according to official data. EFE
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