Iberostar opens its Madrid-Havana route with World2Fly

Havana, September 22 (EFE). Spanish multinational hotel Iberostar on Wednesday operated the first World2Fly flight on the Madrid-Havana route after announcing the reopening of 16 hotels under its management on the Caribbean island, which will gradually reopen. Borders from November 15th.

Flights to the Cuban capital will – in principle – have flights Wednesday and Sunday on the Airbus A350, one of two planes in the airline’s fleet that began operations in the Caribbean last June with flights to Punta Cana (Dominican Republic) and Cancun (Mexico). ).

Miguel Floxa, President of Iberostar Group on the island of Mallorca, announced today after arriving in Havana on the inaugural World2 Fly flight, that the future plan is to have a daily flight on this route with holiday package customers, when conditions permit.

The day before, the Spanish company, one of the largest in the Cuban tourism sector, announced the reopening of 16 of the 17 hotels operating in the country between November and January 2022, as well as the opening of the new Coral facility Level Esmeralda. In Cayo Cruz, in the Jardin del Rey archipelago north of the province of Camaguey, in the center-east.

With this goal, the hotel factory has been renovated and sanitary procedures are ensured in accordance with the new concepts in customer service due to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to its managers.

Floxa stressed that reactivating its hotels in Cuba is a “logical step” because when the island completes the vaccination against Covid-19 “it will open to the world and will be the same as before.”

“So we have a bet because we want Cuba to work to improve the economy and we believe that tourism will improve the economy of this country,” the businessman added.

Iberostar’s airline opened direct flights from Spain to Punta Cana and Cancun last June, with the potential to muster more than 55,000 passengers before the end of the year, when the company envisions a more favorable scenario for the tourism industry as coronavirus disease vaccines advance.

Iberostar has operated Cuban 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.

Together with the Spanish chains Meliá and Barceló, 70% of the rooms in the island’s state hotels are occupied by management contracts.

Cuban authorities have advanced that by November more than 90% of the island’s 11.2 million residents will have had a three-dose schedule of antiviral vaccines developed by national institutions.

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 exchange 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).

In 2020, it aspires to receive about 4.5 million foreign tourists, thus reversing the 9.3% decline in 2019, when 4.2 million visitors traveled to the country, 436,352 fewer tourists than in 2018, according to official data. EFE

rmo / lh / cfa

(photo) (video)

© EFE 2021. Redistribution and redistribution of all or part of the contents of the Efe Services, without the prior and express consent of EFE SA, is expressly prohibited.