Morocco’s Tourism Industry Faces Sharp Decline as Coronavirus Impacts Travel

Cancellations of hotel bookings, at Royal Air Maroc (RAM)... Moroccan tourism is doing poorly. "We were on an upward trend with very strong double-digit growth in bookings compared to 2019 and today, our activity is, unfortunately, going back down almost to stability compared to the previous year," confides an internal source of the national airline to Médias24. "From there, it is obvious that the shortfall will be significant, and even if it is too early to pronounce, we can talk about several tens of millions of dirhams".

For his part, a member of the ministerial crisis cell confirms that the month of March will be negatively impacted in terms of arrivals and overnight stays. "The supervisory ministry does not want to communicate for the moment in order not to reinforce the panic that is beginning to set in among hoteliers in particular, he suggests. [...] Thus, during our last meeting, we mentioned the provisional figure of 100,000 fewer domestic arrivals for the month of March, and at least 10,000 booking cancellations, to date, for the ochre city alone, which has not experienced a crisis since 2017."

According to him, if a cure for the coronavirus is not found very quickly, it is already certain that tourism professionals will lose several hundred thousand arrivals and at least one million overnight stays at the TES (Foreign Tourism of Stay) level. "Operators have almost gotten used to this idea; but in fact, what they dread the most is that this crisis will also impact domestic tourism, which represents the first market in terms of overnight stays (30% of the 25 million in 2019)," he says.