VisitBenidorm-Hosbec collaboration, decisive in managing the Covid crisis to protect Benidorm brand

Organized by the Department of Social and Legal Sciences of Juan Gil-Albert Institute of Culture of Alicante, a colloquium was held yesterday afternoon focused on "Tourism in times of vaccines" in which the managing director of VisitBenidorm, Leire Bilbao, led a focused debate in the performance of Benidorm through the milestones that have marked the health, social and economic crisis that we are still going through.
The mayor of Benidorm, Toni Pérez, and the president of Hosbec, Toni Mayor, analyzed a sequential process, from January 2020 until today, where, on each of the key moments, they described the actions developed, always together, to preserve the Benidorm brand and the social and economic fabric of the tourist destination city.
After presenting the great data of the lived process, Pérez highlighted the work of "two great teams working together, hard work and applied intelligence", to solve each and every one of the setbacks that arose.
The story began prior to the FITUR2020 fair by analyzing the news that was arriving, requesting the first meeting of Health on February 11. And from then on, the sequence of major decisions adopted by the City Council and Hosbec, anticipating events and government decisions until reaching the closure of beaches and the hotel plant, developing an operation to evacuate tourists to their places of origin, pointing out in particular the conversations with British tour operators. Pérez pointed out that "the objective was to protect the brand and the lives of workers, residents and tourists." And after that, "the development of the first protection manuals and protocols that the ministry immediately adopted."
In this sense, the mayor of Benidorm pointed out that of Benidorm and Hosbec, "in the first week of April the Plan for the Special Protection of Tourism was prepared, which was completed in detail by the Alliance of Tourist Municipalities and was also submitted to the ministry" given the need for aids that have not been produced.
Aspects such as generating awareness of the city, managing the social and economic sustainability of the city, attending urgently to families and minors, arranging accommodation for toilets, managing a city in a crisis situation and continuing to work on promotional aspects, remembering that Benidorm continues to wait as happiness icon made up milestones of the debate.
The reopening of beaches in June 2020, the Benidorm Beach Safety initiative to manage and offer safety on beaches, for everyone and every day, the Benidorm Island project and day-to-day work to reactivate the city with urban actions thinking about the return to activity were other milestones analyzed, such as the incidence of perimeter closures.
At the conclusion of the session, Benidorm's ability to react to this situation and real knowledge of the situation that exists thanks to the analysis of the data that leads us to know, highlighted Mayor, that “now we have some borrowed clients that exist to know how to build loyalty; they have discovered a new Benidorm that meets their highest expectations ”. Benidorm, Mayor said, is being renewed from hotels to the urban scene and, as Leire Bilbao indicated, they work and comply with the protocols to the extent that no infections have been reported in any hotel.
In favor of vaccines and speed in vaccination campaigns, the speakers highlighted the need to complete the processes to achieve a more favorable situation for the resumption of maximum mobility, pointing out that Tourism is the vaccine.
For the mayor of Benidorm, the fundamental thing is that “faith and trust in the destination have not been lost, neither by businessmen nor by tourists, which gives us added encouragement - he said - to continue working for a global concept - Benidorm tourist destination- that likes and satisfies ”.
As a culmination of the colloquium, it was pointed out that the Imserso vacation program is poorly dimensioned, it has been reduced in number and in the absence of expectations in it, great hope is placed on British tourism for this autumn.