Hotels in the Czech Republic are expected to be allowed to open for business again on May 25, but it’s unclear how many will use the opportunity. In the first place, not all of them will have survived the crisis, especially those who were already operating on a financial knife-edge or who had problems with debts or bank loans. But Seznam.cz reports that there are some hotels in the country’s biggest tourist towns who claim it will be more economically harmful to open than to remain in hibernation. The government is working on a plan to work with employers to hand out tourism vouchers to their employees to encourage them to take trips in the Czech Republic and support local hotels. But the sector’s dependence on foreigners is so extreme that this isn’t likely to help much. “Hotels are going to have problems,” Sivek Hotels director Viliam Sivek told Seznam News. “For the hotels in the country to survive, every Czech including babies would have to stay in a hotel for at least 8 days. And that’s not realistic, so yes, I expect that hotels will have problems and some of them simply won’t survive.”
The director of the hotel network Le Hotels Group Petr Lžičař agrees with this framing of the problem. “Prague hotels, especially those in the center, are for the most part dependent on foreign guests. The idea that we could replace this group with Czech tourists is completely off-base and is nothing more than flapping about either through ignorance or political agitation.”
