The Spanish company RIU Hotels & Resorts has focused its efforts on Mexico given the importance of the market in the face of the crisis experienced by tourism due to the covid-19 pandemic. The hotel chain has already recovered the guests lost at the worst moment of the health contingency, and now it is going for more hotels in what has become its largest market worldwide.
“Mexico put up with the company during the pandemic,” said Catalina Alemany, director of corporate social responsibility at RIU, referring to the proportion of workers that the country concentrates globally, 37.6% in 2021 among 20 countries, even surpassing Spain .
“That is why the human capital of Mexico has such an important percentage in 2021 and in 2022. The Mexican workforce was very important because the activity in Mexico was the one that endured and recovered RIU’s business in 2021 ”, he said at a press conference in the framework of the 25th anniversary of the company in the country.
The company has also recovered the number of guests it received before the pandemic. While in 2019 it served 1.5 million clients in Mexico, by 2020 the figure fell to 922,200, but by 2021 it had rebounded to 1.6 million guests .
However, sales have not recovered at the same rate, because while the company recorded revenues of more than 683 million dollars in 2019, for the following year they fell to 326 million. For 2021, sales rebounded to 551 million, 20% below what was achieved in 2019.
This year the company plans two new openings: a RIU Palace Kukulkan complex, in Cancun , and RIU Latino , in Costa Mujeres . With this, the company will have 22 hotels in the country, adding just over 2,000 workers to its workforce and more than 1,000 rooms to its portfolio.
Although the investment amount of both complexes was not broken down, the resources allocated to the renovation of hotels, as well as their construction, have risen to 772 million dollars in the last five years, according to company data.
In addition, the company plans to almost triple its investments for social initiatives in Mexico, which will go from $155,600 to $449,700 this year, and will climb to $800,000 by 2023 . Most of the resources will go to social initiatives for children, as well as biodiversity projects.
