Marrakech Tourism Sees Brief Uptick as Hotels Reopen for Holiday Weekend

It’s a first in over a year. For three days, Marrakech shone brightly, reports L’Économiste, specifying that it was while ensuring compliance with barrier gestures, to the delight of shopkeepers and craftsmen in the medina.

Marrakech owes this fleeting improvement to national tourists (from Casablanca, Rabat, Fez and the north during these school holidays) and a few small Russian or American groups who continue to choose the Moroccan destination, happy to go to Marrakech to unload their excess stress related to the pandemic. Not to mention the business for villas and furnished apartments.

The newspaper reports an occupancy rate of around 40% for the establishments, especially the clubs. Much less than the units located in the Hivernage district (golden triangle) or the luxury hotels or the establishments on the road to Fez. On the other hand, notes the same source, the 3-star hotels had less luck.

But this picture of momentary improvement does not reassure the AirBnB platform which, although having been the scene of significant movement, is still impacted by significant losses and concerned about the prospects. And, speaking about the authorizations for inter-city travel, Mustapha Malik, a hotelier in the city and president of the sustainable tourism commission of the CRT of Marrakech/Safi suggests: "If we really want to relaunch the destination, we will have to cancel this procedure to encourage national tourists to travel".

It is worth adding the animation and the destiny of places of entertainment (restaurants, lounges, monuments...), with a "calendar for the reopening of borders", the lack of which risks "making us disappear from the radars of tour operators and vacationers" laments Lahcen Zelmat, a hotelier in Marrakech and president of the national federation of the hotel industry, who denounces the silence of the authorities in the face of their cries of distress. The consequence, he laments, the French who represented 40% of arrivals in Marrakech before Covid are turning away from the destination, to the delight of competing brands.