Benidorm begins the process to enable six PRI’s of hotels to improve category and facilities

Benidorm City Council has started the process today to make possible six Internal Reform Plans (PRI) of hotels in the city that want to improve their category and facilities based on the specific modification number 1 of the General Plan of ‘Hotel Incentivation’. The City Councilor, Lourdes Caselles, recalled that this modification "allows the buildability of the common areas of hotel establishments not compute, so that those square meters can be used for more and larger rooms." "This increase in the size of the rooms and their benefits, means an improvement in the quality of the hotel plant", but also reverts in the general interest since the establishments have to compensate the City Council that increases its endowment floors. A compensation that is fixed precisely in a PRI.

The rule establishes various forms of compensation, all of them linked to increasing municipal land assets. Thus, hotels that want to make more rooms or larger will have to yield to the City Council two linear meters of facade to increase the size of the sidewalks, and thus improve the pedestrian surface. If compensation is not covered with these façade meters, the establishments must also provide endowment land or cash for the City Council to acquire.

As Caselles explained, “we have started the environmental phase of these files; a phase that is prior to urban planning and that since 2016 we can solve at the municipal headquarters thanks to the creation of the so-called Strategic Environmental Assessment Commission ”. A Commission that has met today, which is chaired by the mayor, Toni Pérez, and which is made up of municipal technicians from the areas of Architecture, Engineering, Legal Advice, Secretariat and Environment.

The head of Urban Planning has indicated that "the fact of having this Commission for Strategic Environmental Assessment allows us to expedite and simplify the processing of this type of files and shorten the deadlines, since the City Council assumes a procedure that the Department used to do" .

In addition to initiating the dossier of these six PRI’s, the Environmental Assessment Commission has favorably resolved a seventh, also presented by a hotel, and which now must be resolved in an urban phase, be exposed to the public and be approved in full.

In the last 5 years, the City Council has given the green light to four hotel PRI’s, which translates into total revenues of more than 800,000 euros.