Should we open Goa hotels?

According to the President of Small & Medium Hotels Associations in Goa, its members are looking to open their doors only by 2021, considering high operating bills even with miniscule or zero occupancies.

Hazel Jain

While the star category hotels in Goa are seeing some guest check-ins, the small and medium hotels in the UT are rolling under mounting water and electricity bills with almost zero occupancy.

Serafino Cota, President, Small & Medium Hotels Associations, says, “Our members don’t want to keep their hotels open anymore. What is happening in Goa is that while the government is trying to show that it is opening the state to tourism, at the same time, it is not extending any help to us. Even if we get one guest with great difficulty for a few days, the government marks the hotel as ‘operational’ and then they start charging you for full electricity, water bill, etc., so people prefer to close it altogether.”

Cota is also a hotel owner but he is now looking at doing agriculture for the time being. “There is no scope for business right now. It will take some time. If you really want to open things up and the economy to grow, then you also have to help the businesses stay open. The government is just looking to charge the hotels for everything. We are not asking for dole or anything. But at least be fair with us, we can’t afford to pay the water and electricity bills with a single guest. When there is no guest, that means there is no consumption, but the rule in Goa is that even if one guest is there, we are charged for minimum consumption,” Cota adds.

He explains that minimum consumption is not the same as actual consumption. “Earlier, we could afford to pay bills on minimum consumption because we had business. Now, for not consuming the minimum electricity we are still being charged. Our bills are coming with the remark ‘minimum consumption’ fee, which is quite high,” Cota adds. For example, if a hotel is normally using 100 units, the minimum consumption is fixed at say 50 units. But with one or two guests, hotels can’t even manage to use one unit. “The government did give us a 50 per cent waiver on electricity duty charges, but that is not very high anyway. So we have decided to open only in September 2021,” he says.

No charters this year

Cota shares that even the charter companies are not showing any interest in coming to Goa. “The cases are increasing. Also, charters require a lot of permissions and they have to work out a schedule three to four months in advance. So far there is no information of any charters. I expect Goa to be at peak in November 2020 in terms of number of cases,” he says.

The bottom line is, he says, that they want guests to be safe, staff to be safe, and the people of Goa to be safe. “We have a policy that anything we do has to be in the interest of the community. We have to control the infection rate and we would rather have a better business later than get dangerous business now. When people move around, the infection is bound to rise,” Cota adds.