Registration for the program is voluntary for spa facilities. According to Dostálová, all spas that have the appropriate certification and are registered at the Ministry of Health can participate. According to the deputy regional section of David Koppitz, the ministry will update their list every day. “We believe that in the end all spas that meet the given conditions will apply,” he said.
According to the state agency CzechTourism, there are about ninety companies doing business in the Czech Republic. Of these, 68 registered for the voucher program. Companies usually have several hotels or spa houses under them.
Vouchers are given to people over the age of 18 who pay for health insurance. They will print the voucher and present it at the spa or print it out directly at the spa. The discount will be 40 percent of the stay, a maximum of four thousand crowns.
According to Dostálová, people can also apply for the discount for stays purchased through travel agencies. According to her, the client will have a discounted stay immediately, when booking the stay he will enter the relevant voucher number. “Subsequently, the billing is between the spa facility and the state,” she said. According to her, the settlement will take place once a month until the end of January next year.
One billion crowns are available for vouchers
In total, the government has set aside a billion crowns for vouchers, so up to 250,000 vouchers can be issued. However, people will not be able to add up the voucher offered by, for example, Karlovy Vary to support tourism, and the state voucher.
Previously, the government considered supporting all tourism without restriction. The original value of the voucher was to be ten thousand crowns, the state, the employee and the employer were to participate in it. However, according to Dostálová, the companies were not in favor of the contribution this year due to the crisis. According to her, they would think about it for years to come. They could deduct the amount from taxes.
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According to Dostalová, the infoline has also been operating since Wednesday morning, where people can direct their questions. Operators have handled over 300 calls on her since 8:00, she said.
The support is intended to partially compensate the spa, as one of the sectors most affected by the coronavirus crisis, for the shortage of foreign clients. According to the Ministry of Regional Development, guests from abroad accounted for up to 44 percent of Czech spa clients. According to the Czech Ministry, Czech clients are unable to replace foreign clients, whose spas may lose 170 to 200,000 due to the current situation.
The aim of the program is, among other things, to teach Czech travelers to spend multi-day stays in the spa with the use of medical services. In addition, the support provided is intended to contribute to the reconstruction of the region.
According to the data of the Czech Statistical Office, the number of visitors to spas in the Czech Republic has been increasing every year since 2016 until last year. In 2019, it increased by 3.4 percent year on year. According to the office, 55 percent of last year’s 880,134 spa guests were Czechs.
Czechs have had a majority share in the number of visitors to domestic spas since 2014. Among guests from abroad, Germans predominate. There are spa facilities in eight regions of the republic, among which the Karlovy Vary region dominates in spas, for which spas represent a fundamental part of its economy.
Czechs are requesting longer domestic holidays
Looking at current statistics on holiday sales, it is now clear, for example, according to the Slevomat discount portal, that the demand for long stays is predominant among Czechs in the Czech Republic, in contrast to previous years, when there was interest mainly in weekend stays.
“This year, the greatest demand is for weekly to 14-day holidays. In demand, the Giant Mountains lead, followed by Prague, just behind it the spa triangle of Moravia, Šumava and Beskydy, “states Ladislav Veselý, Director of Slevomat. According to him, sales focused on domestic holidays are now about double last year.
And the latest survey of the travel portal Skrz.cz shows that for seventy percent of Czechs, interest in traveling is not so much conditioned by the budget, but that one of the important motives is to support the local economy.
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A quarter of a million people are employed in tourism. According to the president of the Tourism Forum Viliam Sivka, two hundred thousand places are endangered without state support.
Every year, tourism pays more than 125 billion crowns into public budgets. According to the CzechTourism agency, tourism accounts for three percent of the Czech Republic’s gross domestic product. This year, tourism is expected to fall by more than half, Prague accounted for about 60 percent of tourism in the Czech Republic.
Overall, global tourism revenues may fall by as much as $ 3.3 trillion this year, equivalent to 4.2 percent of GDP due to coronavirus, according to the latest UNCTAD study.
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