“In Serbia, more than 2,000 tourist workers have lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic,” said the director of the National Association of Tourism Agencies of Serbia (YUTA), Aleksandar Senicic.
“In Serbia, about 60 percent of the people who worked in travel and car rental agencies lost their jobs. Unfortunately, we don’t see the end of the pandemic and we don’t have much reason to be very optimistic this year,” Senicic said.
About 4,000 people worked in tourism, travel agencies and car rental companies, and in January this year, about 45 percent of them lost their jobs.
An additional number of people lost their jobs after the expiration of the employers’ obligation to retain them, who had received government aid to keep the workers.
According to Senicic, Serbian travel agencies that organized trips abroad previously had a turnover of between 1 and 1.5 billion euro each year.
“Last year, the turnover was 150 million euro, which means that more than 1.2 billion euro of turnover was lost. On the other hand, the agencies themselves lost between 120 and 150 million euro, which is a big loss for such a small country”, Senicic warned.
Looking at the domestic tourism, receptive tourism in Serbia was expanding before the coronavirus and generated revenue of 1.2 billion euro during the year.
“Because of COVID-19, the results are 60% weaker,” Senicic pointed out, adding that the situation would be even worse if only foreign tourist data was analyzed as local tourists were forced to stay in Serbia so the loss was compensated to some extent.
(Nova, 21.02.2021)
https://nova.rs/vesti/biznis/u-turizmu-zbog-korone-bez-posla-ostalo-vise-2-000-ljudi/
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