display
Palma / Hanover (dpa) - Even before the start of the Easter holidays, the number of tourists on the Spanish Mediterranean island of Mallorca has risen.
"At the weekend it is already quite full at the Ballermann", reported Beatrice Ciccardini, the landlady of the "Zur Krone" bar.
She also had German tourists at the bar again.
Now parking spaces are rare again.
"Otherwise the search for a free space on the Playa de Palma was not a problem, but now everything is full with the vacationers' rental cars," said Ciccardini.
The largest travel company Tui reports sustained strong bookings shortly before the start of the early Easter season on Mallorca.
"There is still a clear demand for the newly launched trips," it said on Thursday from the company in Hanover.
"The positive trend from the weekend continues."
Tui had stated that so far there were about twice as many Mallorca bookings in the systems as before the Easter holidays in 2019, i.e. the comparison period before the Corona crisis.
display
The Duisburg tour operator Schauinsland also reported a sharp increase in bookings.
The company has therefore purchased additional flight capacities.
"We are currently seeing a doubling of the daily incoming bookings for the Easter holidays," said Schauinsland manager Andreas Rüttgers.
One could not speak of a “run on Mallorca”, however, as this formulation would convey the wrong picture.
The booking numbers are "despite the doubling, still many times lower than in a normal season, so that the island will still be very, very empty."
The federal government decided on Friday to remove Mallorca and other regions in Spain from the list of corona risk areas due to low infection rates and thus also to lift the travel warning from the Federal Foreign Office.
This means that since Sunday it has been possible to vacation on the Germans' favorite island again without quarantine and mandatory testing upon return.
However, the federal government had also called for a general refusal to travel to tourism.
The local Ministry of Tourism does not have exact figures as to how many holidaymakers from Germany and elsewhere are currently on Mallorca and the other Balearic Islands.
The hotelier association FEHM states an occupancy rate of the 49 open hotels of 10 to 15 percent.
There are a total of around 1,000 hotels with around 200,000 beds on Mallorca.
display
The President of the German Hotel and Restaurant Association, Guido Zöllick, said with a view to the lifting of the travel warning for Mallorca that it could not be explained that the federal government on the one hand makes vacation on an international scale possible, but a visit to local beer gardens is still not allowed.
The chairman of the German Hotel Association, Otto Lindner, emphasized with a view to Mallorca that a “debate about envy” would not be helpful.
There are considerable requirements for hotels.
His company operates hotels there itself.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210318-99-879656 / 2