Reopening a hotel after fifteen months

BarcelonaThe front door of the Hotel Lloret is one of those that opens automatically when someone approaches the threshold, but it had become stuck and there was no way to unlock it after no customer approached it for more than a year. The hotel is at the top of Barcelona's Rambla, near the Canaletes fountain, a prime location, but has been closed for fifteen months because of the pandemic. On Monday of last week it finally reopened its doors - after fixing them, of course - and its owner, Armand Vives, has been wearing a permanent smile from ear to ear ever since. He can't hide the joy he feels. He foresees that the hotel will continue to make losses, but he is confident that the bleeding will not be like during the months when it was closed. "It's the end of the tunnel", he says. The maintenance cost of the closed hotel was 45,000 euros a month".

The automatic entrance door is not the only thing that has broken down during all this time. The air conditioners in twenty of the hotel's seventy rooms don't work either, nor does the device that guarantees the same water pressure in all the taps. And this, according to Vives, they were checking it during the ten days prior to the reopening of the establishment. But when it came to the moment of truth, things began to fail. Although the first day they only had three occupied rooms, the second reached ten and the third twenty. Now the hotel's occupancy rate is between 50% and 60%.

In fact, you can see a certain movement of people in the lobby of the establishment: two customers coming down the stairs, another one taking the elevator, two workers passing by loaded with buckets and mops... "Mostly tourists have come from France and Italy", says the receptionist, Jack Bear, who can't resist the temptation to take off his mask for a moment to show the broad smile on his face. He too is happy to be back to work after fifteen months on ERTE . "We're missing the English, the Austrians, the Dutch", he adds, referring to the regular customers who haven't shown up yet.

Low prices

The Hotel Lloret is a one-star establishment, so it did not aspire to accommodate the Mobile congress participants. Nor does it aspire now to recover the activity and income it had before the pandemic, says its owner. For starters, ten of the hotel's nineteen workers are still on ERTE and the price of the rooms corresponds to the rates for the winter season and not the summer.

"The rooms cost 60 euros, when in summer we charged 110 or 120", says Vives, but he says they cannot raise prices more because the three and four star hotels are also applying lower rates than the standard and the goal is to attract customers. In short, they continue to add up losses but, he says, "opening was a psychological necessity". The accumulated expenses were already too much.

Vives has had to sell a flat that his mother had in France to cover the cost of maintaining the closed hotel, and also requested one of the ICO loans to combat the covid-19 guaranteed by the State. Specifically, he asked for 500,000 euros that disappeared in a matter of months and will now have to return. "They have given us two years of adjustment to do so", he explains. Be that as it may, his future is mortgaged.

Customer understanding

Despite this, the best thing of all, he says, is the understanding of the customers. It doesn't matter that the front door is stuck, that the water pressure in the taps is not good or that this week they didn't change the towels in the toilets one day because the industrial laundry where they wash them is also working at half throttle and they deliver the orders when they can. "Everyone takes care of it", says Vives.

The receptionist also corroborates that customers now demand less than ever: "Some even don't want us to prepare the rooms for them to avoid a possible contagion". For the same reason now the hotel also does not serve breakfast and in the corridors there are signs indicating that it is compulsory to wear a mask in the common areas. Because, be that as it may, we are still in a pandemic.