With the condition that they do not fire any workers by the end of the year, hotel owners in cities in Serbia will receive state aid of 350 euros per bed and 150 euros per room.
The decision was announced to the public yesterday after a series of meetings that state representatives had with hoteliers in the last two weeks. The Minister of Finance, Sinisa Mali, announced that in the next 10 days, a public invitation will be published for everyone who wants to apply for help, which could arrive at the end of September or at the beginning of October this year at the latest. At a time when the occupancy of city hotels is just a little above zero, for hoteliers, as they say, any help is great.
“This help is important and will help hotels to survive and try to prepare for the next season, that is, for spring. There are a lot of things that need to be done, innovations and investments, but this will help us survive,” HORES President Georgi Genov told Danas.
His colleague from the Association and the owner of several hotels, some of which are Tomislav Momirovic from the city, says that this is another in a series of state aid, after three minimum wages and two payments in the amount of 60 percent of the minimum wage.
“This is a selective and direct support to endangered hotels, which means that it exclusively refers to those hotels in cities that have not managed to compensate for large losses due to the absence of foreign guests. This will help the hotels to survive and keep the employees,” Momirovic notes.
He points out that tourism was supposed to be a generator of economic growth, but that this is not possible now due to the situation in which this sector finds itself not only in our country, but in the whole world.
When asked if the city hotels have taken a step forward in the last two months and moved from the deadlock, Momirovic says that everything is still standing.
“Occupancy is between zero and five percent, you have an average of 9 percent occupancy when you count those who live in certain hotels for usually small money. When we talk about what the situation is like and whether it is going well or badly, when you have a drop of 10%, then you say that it is bad. Now we have a drop of more than 90 percent, so business doesn’t really exist,” Tomislav Momirovic emphasizes. He reminds that in Belgrade, from 110 to 120 hotels, as many as 50 percent of them are closed.
The director of the Radisson Collected Hotel in Belgrade, Aleksandar Vasilijevic, said that “this is a great help that the city hotels will be able to use to pay the workers and for promotion.”
“This financial support is welcome because the hotels are constantly in the red, and the state has taken part of the risk so that a large number of hotels would not be closed as of September 1,” Vasilijevic said, as reported by Beta.
As he added, the help from 50,000 euros to 200,000 that the hotels will receive “is a big wind in the back and a good sign for investors”.
On the other hand, the co-owner of the Meat Industry “Matijevic”, which includes several hotels, Zoran Matijevic, said that the hotel business has “big declines” and that the owners will recalculate whether it is more profitable for them to accept state aid or close the hotel, Danas reports.
