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François Koepp from the hospitality federation is looking with worry at the months ahead. Photo: Mike Zenari  

Koepp of the hospitality sector federation Horesca estimates that it will take the sector years to fully recover from the crisis.

Before looking ahead at the next year, let’s take a brief look back at 2020. How has the Horesca secteur changed in the past few months? 

François Koepp - It has changed a lot during the past few months, but we need to differentiate between two different types of businesses. 

There are seasonal businesses, meaning primarily vacation hotels and then there is business tourism and the decrease in activity in that area has been enormous. We have a decrease in activity since January, in the business tourism area, of about 60-70%. 

However, this does not go for leisure tourism, because, upon reopening, and with the introduction of our “safe to serve” campaign, they were able to have a really strong start into the summer season. This has immensely helped restaurants, cafés and hotels especially in the east and the north of the country where the majority of leisure hotels are situated. I would even go as far as to say that it has saved their lives.

Some businesses have even had an excellent summer, better than the previous year. This is partly due to the €50 hospitality vouchers that were introduced in collaboration with the ministry and the Chamber of Commerce. This has extremely helped the hospitality sector in the country and it has also strengthened local tourism. 

Looking ahead to 2021, what are your expectations for Luxembourg’s hospitality sector? 

I would say the beginning of 2021, say the first three months, we will not see any improvement compared to the current year. Not much will change, the situation will continue to stay critical. We will have to analyse the situation in detail, evaluate it and then take decisions. Talking about hotels in particular, my forecast would be that city hotels will have an occupancy of around 30% over January, February, March and I think pretty much the same will be true for hotels in rural areas. 

But we will need help if we want to continue without redundancies. The last thing we want to do is have to lay off people. We really want to maintain a social Luxembourg. However, looking beyond these three months, in April and the spring/summer season when terraces will be able to reopen, I believe that that will help to improve the situation. But we will most certainly need to wait until 2023 to reach a full recovery of the sector. 

With all of the challenges faced recently and those still to come in the months ahead, do you also see opportunities for the sector next year? 

The hospitality vouchers. We would have been extremely grateful if the expiration date of these vouchers could have been extended into the coming year, but obviously it was just a temporary measure. Maybe someone will come up with the idea to do the same thing again. The vouchers were a really good initiative that has helped the hospitality sector extremely and it would be a great help if something similar could be done next year.

Another thing that came out of this year and that I think will be of crucial importance in the upcoming year is the “safe to serve” label that we introduced as a guarantor for quality and safety. This is going to be key in the months to come because there are people out there that are genuinely scared and this fear will extend into the upcoming year. So the label will help businesses to adopt the right hygiene measures and hopefully give customers a feeling of safety, making them more likely to go to eat out again. 

So what’s the verdict? 

2021 will look better than 2020 for the hospitality sector. Obviously this will, to a certain extent, be dependent on the health situation, but in general I am quite sure that it will be a better year for the Horesca. We need to reinstate trust and then things will start to look better, even if it is quite obvious that in 2021 we will not be able to achieve results anywhere close to 2019.  

A version of this article was originally published in Delano’s January 2021 edition. Be the first to read the magazine by subscribing for home or office delivery here.